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Abstract

This study investigates how image-generating artificial intelligence (AI) tools shape artistic identity, creativity, and pedagogical practice within the framework of autoethnography. Focusing on Midjourney, a generative image tool, I worked collaboratively with two art students based in Canada, Scotland and India, over two months of online artmaking sessions. Together, we produced artworks, reflections, and conversations that formed a living archive of human-AI intra-action. Through thematic and diffractive analysis, five key themes surfaced: negotiating creativity with AI, ethical reflections and dilemmas, encountering AI’s limitations, learning through experience, and material encounters. Central to the study is the concept of glitch pedagogy, where errors, breakdowns, and disorientations are reframed as openings for learning and critical reflection. Rather than treating AI’s failures as mere noise, collaborators engaged with them as sites of meaning-making, questioning the partialities, biases, and hegemonies embedded in algorithmic systems. In a nutshell, this research study reveals that creativity in the postdigital era is a relational process. Artworks emerge not in isolation, but through entanglements among artists, materials, technologies, and contexts. By situating AI’s limitations or “glitches” as catalysts for inquiry, the study highlights how art education can cultivate critical AI literacy, encourage process over product, and embrace uncertainty as a pedagogical resource. The presumption highlights the educational significance of engaging with AI not only as a creative partner but also as a contested site where ethics, politics, and aesthetics converge.