From Imagination to Automation: How AI is Reshaping Students Creativity in the Digital Age

Abstract

The explosive diffusion of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and especially large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT has changed the ways students ideate, draft, design and iterate creative work in digitally mediated learning environments. Yet the educational implications for creativity are still being debated GenAI has the potential to raise the novelty and perceived quality of outputs, while raising the possibilities for over reliance, lower creative confidence, and lost learning by doing, and homogenization of ideas among the learners. This paper presents its own integrative conceptual synthesis of how GenAI reshapes student creativity, based during the creativity theory (componential and developmental views), socio material and distributed views of creative action, and recent empirical evidence on artificial help in ideation and writing. We propose Imagination Automation Creativity Loop (IACL), which is a model of the process outlining when GenAI can act as a catalyst of creative learning (augmentation) and when it acts as substitute and weakens creative agency automation. The model offers an emphasis on three mechanisms, that is, cognitive offloading, idea anchoring, and the amplification iteration and are accompanied by moderating condition including artificial intelligence literacy, task constraint, assessment design, and classroom norms around disclosure and authorship. We translate the framework into teachable pedagogy in the form of policy recommendations such as process oriented assessment, structured prompting with reflection and pedagogy of explicit teaching aimed at saving student voice. Finally, we discuss a research agenda for proper causal and longitudinal research that measures both the success of creativity at the individual level and the rupture of diversity at the collective level in a classroom with access to AI.