More Art School Classes Are Teaching AI This Fall Despite Ethical Concerns and Ongoing Lawsuits

When undergraduate students return to the Ringling College of Art and Design this fall, one of the school’s newest offerings will be an AI certificate.

Ringling is just the latest of several top art schools to offer undergraduate students courses that focus on or integrate artificial intelligence tools and techniques.

ARTnews spoke to experts and faculty at Ringling, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and Florida State University about how they construct curriculum; how they teach AI in consideration of its limitations and concerns about ethics and legal issues; as well as why they think it’s important for artists to learn.

“Knowing how these tools work and how they don’t work, and what they can do and what they can’t do is, we think an important step in a successful artist standing out, right?” Ringling’s AI coordinator, Rick Dakan, told ARTnews. “There’s a million different ways you can apply AI that aren’t having it write the story or make the art for you.”

Ringling’s certificate requires the completion of three courses—a required one on the fundamentals of AI as well as two electives: AI Techniques and Processes for Art, Topics in Artificial Intelligence and/or an existing course that has been revised to “have at least 30 percent of its curricular content related to AI.”

On a practical basis, Ringling teaches its students how to use a variety of AI tools to help them stand out from the “sea of AI-generated garbage,” whether it be through helping with writing, storytelling, creating apps, writing code, or even managing the data of a fanbase or social media presence.

Prior to the launch of the certificate, Dakan taught a creative writing course on writing with AI last fall, followed by the creation of an AI task force at the college last summer. He said that the task force worked to assess the implications of AI on Ringling’s curriculum; to see what other institutions were doing; surveyed students, faculty and staff; held workshops and meetings; suggested language for syllabi and proposals for AI policies for different majors; as well as bringing in outside experts.

Computer animation is one of the majors at Ringling College offering revised courses that integrate AI tools. Photo by Karen Arango. Courtesy of Ringling College of Art and Design.

Many of these revised courses are in Ringling’s technical majors such as virtual reality development, computer animation, motion design, and game art, because the tool sets and industries are more amenable to AI outputs.

“In a lot of these courses, the AI-generated material is not the final output, but rather it’s being used in earlier phases like ideation,” Dakan said. “Rather than focusing on generating an AI output that you put out into the world, figuring out where AI can give you assistance in making your product better, whatever that is.”

By comparison, RISD and CMU have much longer histories of teaching AI in art classes.

When ARTnews asked several professors at CMU’s College of Fine Arts about the use of AI in classes, art professor Golan Levin emailed an extensive reply outlining the difference between early research at the university on AI in the 1980s and ’90s and today’s generative AI systems.

“I would say that there has been a clear interest and demonstrable effort at CMU, in the arts, to engage with new technologies for at least the past 40 years,” Levin wrote, noting AI had been “extensively integrated” into the college’s art courses going back as far as the 1980s.

CMU’s visual arts program has offered students an interdisciplinary concentration in Electronic and Time-Based art (computer art) since the late ’80s, but taught its first full-semester undergraduate course wholly dedicated to art and AI in the spring semester of 2018. Several alumni of Carnegie Mellon’s hybrid bachelor’s degree in computer science and art have also focused specifically on AI-based art, including multidisciplinary artist Joel Simon.

“Personally, I have been teaching computational and interactive new media art at CMU since 2004, and my courses have always included an AI component (though not necessarily a semester-long AI focus),” Levin wrote.

Clement Valla, RISD’s dean of Experimental and Foundation Studies (EFS), said the first studio class at RISD that taught a large language model—the type of machine learning that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google Gemini—was at least seven years ago. The art college, Valla said, takes an integrative approach to teaching students about earlier notions of AI and how it connects to the larger disciplines of art and design in fundamental ways, such as courses on the history of humans “seeing” through machines and the history of generative art.

“The idea of systems generating forms, that are more or less under human control, is actually a very ancient idea,” Valla said, noting that West African fractal patterns on rocks go back approximately 3,000 years.

RISD’s Computation, Technology and Culture (CTC) program, meanwhile, also teaches students about computation as an artistic and design medium rather than focusing on specific AI tools or software.

“What kind of inquiries or what kind of questions happen when artists and designers are thinking of something as their medium, rather than just a tool to implement possibly somebody else’s vision?” Valla said. “We’re trying to make artists and designers who understand computation as a medium in practice. We do a lot of computer programming, but we have a lot of students that maybe just work with systems, or maybe that work at that funny interface between the human and the computer.”

RISD has a much more philosophical and integrative approach to teaching AI to its students. Courtesy of the Rhode Island School of Design.

Educators at RISD, Carnegie Mellon and Ringling College told ARTnews it was important to make sure students understand how tools like ChatGPT, Adobe Firefly or Stable Diffusion are trained; the differences between the tools; what went into training them; as well as learning how to discern what they use an AI tool for or why they use it.

“The best place to use AI is earlier in the process,” Keith Roberson, a digital arts associate professor at Florida State University, told ARTnews. “Use these things to explore concepts more so than making things that are going to end up in the finished works. That’s a more useful way, and it’s just a way to put more thought into it.”

At Ringling, art students often use AI text tools to improve their artist statements or to get feedback on their work, explained Dakan, calling AI “a lifter” in areas where students lack certain skills.

Experts acknowledged to ARTnews the multiple sources of tension in teaching AI, including ongoing lawsuits over copyright and intellectual property; the gaps in datasets used for training large language models; as well as the negative effect on commercial and private commissions for a variety of artists.

For legal issues, Ringling explains to students they cannot copyright work that was made with AI, as well as their rights (or lack thereof) for outputs from different tools.

Roberson noted that many of the big complaints about AI are similar to past criticisms about the invention of photography. “We couldn’t trust images before, even with a camera,” he said, noting how cropping could also distort an image. “You can make a camera lie all day long. There’s hardly any new issues with AI that haven’t been there all along.”

CTC faculty at RISD also emphasize to students how these legal and ethical issues aren’t new by drawing attention to cases like Andy Warhol’s images on the Commodore Amiga computer or the history of music scores. “Tracing those through lines—that’s really important to the faculty rather than chasing the new thing, the new legal problem, and having to revise curriculum and syllabus every three years because of a company [like Midjourney or StabilityAI] we have no control over, no say in, decides to change its mind for whatever reason,” Valla said.

Andy Warhol, Andy2, 1985. ©The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., courtesy of the Andy Warhol Museum.

Leaving aside the challenges, there are multiple motivations for teaching students AI, according to CMU’s Levin.

“For artists to claim a seat at the table where technological agendas are set; to develop new forms of cultural expression through the use of new technologies; to explore the cultural potential and new aesthetics made possible by these technologies, and to learn the grain of this material; and to serve as a early warning system of the impact of these technologies on society, where others may not be as acutely sensitive or perceptive to these forces,” he said.

Still, Dakan knows this transition period in the art industry, with AI becoming an increasing presence in software and the daily workflows of artists, will be rocky. “I’m not here to say this is all going to be wonderful in the future,” he said. “I think it’s going to be rough for some people, but I think students who are prepared, artists who are prepared and engaged with the tools, will be in a better position to navigate that future than people who aren’t paying attention, right, who don’t know what it’s capable of. That’s our hope.”

This optimism extends to more ethical ways for student to engage with AI tools, like Spawning AI’s Source.Plus project, which uses nearly 40 million public domain images and images under a Creative Commons CC0 license.

Even with the growing enrollment for art classes teaching the fundamentals of AI, and inquiries from potential employers, there will be some students who complete Ringling’s new certificate who won’t integrate AI into all the creative work they’ll do, according to Dakan.

“I think for some of them it’ll give them the knowledge they need to say, ‘No, AI can’t do this for you.’,” he said. “I think the more common thing is most people are going to say, ‘Let me show you what I can do with help from AI.'”