Authors:

Jagdish Joshi, Atri J Joshi

Abstract:

The swift spread of generative artificial intelligence across higher education and cultural production has begun to disturb many assumptions that once appeared settled, about how learning unfolds, how mastery is cultivated, and how creative labour is understood in writing, media, and the arts. This paper approaches these shifts through a combined Deweyan and critical theoretical lens, placing John Dewey’s conception of art as experience in conversation with Frankfurt School analyses of the culture industry and technological rationality. Located within current debates on AI-mediated education, the discussion centres on a persistent tension: the promise of wider access to creative production on the one hand, and the gradual weakening of slow, experience-based training processes that have traditionally shaped judgment, taste, and democratic agency on the other.

Drawing on Dewey’s insistence that genuinely educative experience emerges from the continuous integration of doing and undergoing, the paper suggests that click-driven generative practices risk becoming mis-educative. By compressing time, diluting embodied involvement, and separating process from outcome, such practices threaten the experiential depth on which reflective learning depends. At the same time, insights from Adorno and Marcuse help clarify how generative AI extends earlier patterns of standardisation, deskilling, and managed consciousness associated with the culture industry, even as it introduces newer forms of technical coordination and control.

Rather than viewing the erosion of traditional training pathways merely as a pedagogical disturbance, the paper frames it as a broader epistemic and political reorganisation of creativity, labour, and subjectivity. It argues that mastery is increasingly being displaced from acts of execution toward forms of evaluative, ethical, and socio-cultural judgment, a shift that remains unresolved and deeply ambivalent. The paper concludes by outlining normative principles for AI-integrated education that seek to safeguard depth of experience, critical negativity, and democratic possibility within contemporary curricular practices.

Keywords:

Generative artificial intelligence; John Dewey; Art as experience; Critical theory; Culture industry; Deskilling; Writing and media education; Technological rationality; Democratic pedagogy.

Vol & Issue:

VOL.17, ISSUE No.4, December 2025