ECU Research Project Tackles AI and Disinformation in Art Education

A comprehensive research initiative exploring the impact of artificial intelligence on creative higher education is underway at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU), led by Dr. Ki Wight. The nine-month project, titled “AI & Disinformation in Art & Design Higher Education,” forms part of a broader two-and-a-half-year research study funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant.

The project addresses a critical gap in understanding how misinformation, disinformation, and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) affect art and design education, fields not traditionally linked to these issues in academic literature.

“These topics are obviously linked as our students are being educated to participate in contemporary creative industries impacted by AI and participating in AI technologies,” explains Dr. Wight. “Our idea was to fill that void and establish a baseline understanding to help inform policy development, teaching practice innovations, and curriculum development.”

The research team includes ECU faculty members Dr. Leah Burns, Michelle Ng, and Dr. Sara Osenton, along with four Master of Design students. Their findings were presented at ECU’s Teaching + Learning Centre’s Practice & Pedagogy Symposium in May 2025 and at the annual academic symposium for the Canadian Society for the Study of Education in Toronto the following month.

After reviewing more than 550 sources, the team identified several concerning trends. They found GenAI is becoming unavoidable in education, potentially leading to the deskilling of creative practitioners while simultaneously threatening their intellectual property through commodification and appropriation. The research also highlighted how AI tools often propagate entrenched biases and inaccuracies, reinforcing misinformation and distorting public understanding of creative work.

Perhaps most troubling, the team discovered that institutional policies frequently move too slowly to adequately respond to the rapid evolution of AI technologies.

To address these challenges within ECU, a “Gen AI Learning Community” will soon be established to gather insights about the technology’s impacts in classrooms. Operating through the Teaching + Learning Centre, this community will bring together educators from various disciplines to develop critical, ethical responses to AI’s effects on creative education.

“There are so many brilliant people doing such incredible things on this topic within ECU’s classrooms and beyond,” says Dr. Wight. “Our hope is to bring together these incredible faculty leaders to keep growing this knowledge base and support fluid, on-the-ground responses to the evolution of the technology.”

The research emphasizes that educational institutions must clarify their values to understand how ethical guidance on AI applies to their specific context. Dr. Wight notes that while experts often call for greater literacy regarding disinformation and AI, what this entails isn’t always articulated.

“The things that underlie literacy are agency, equity, community, and human care,” she explains. “When we use phrases like ‘human-centered’ or ‘centering agency’ or ‘centering collaboration and community,’ that means centering our ethics. We build literacy on that foundation by investigating the tool through the lens of our ethics. We don’t just play with it because it’s new and it’s there.”

This nuanced approach is necessary because AI can mean very different things across creative disciplines. For illustrators, AI might represent an existential threat that could replace paid human work. Meanwhile, in animation and filmmaking, AI-driven tools have been standard for a decade or more.

By gathering discipline-specific knowledge in real-time, the GenAI Learning Community aims to create pedagogical frameworks that remain sensitive to students’ diverse needs while being rapidly deployable in classrooms. The initiative will work to demystify AI while developing hands-on learning opportunities to critically examine its capabilities, limitations, and ethical implications.

Looking ahead, Dr. Wight plans to involve industry groups such as DigiBC as resources for the learning community, work that has already begun with ECU’s industry liaison, Alan Goldman. A public event with media educators is scheduled for early next year, and the team is preparing a publication to share their findings more broadly.

“AI is impacting our world so quickly and profoundly, but as creative practitioners, we have a chance to lead some of these conversations, even at the level where policies are created which can either help or hinder our field,” Dr. Wight says. “My hope is that by doing this type of small-scale testing and work with faculty, we can find a way to share and grow the insights we develop and the solutions we create.”