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Gaëtan Robillard sits down with host Adam Fromme in this episode of the Thinking through Design podcast.
“I cannot predict very far from now what’s going to happen, but clearly education is at stake.” Gaëtan Robillard
As universities rush to make students ‘AI fluent,’ Gaëtan argues the real challenge isn’t adopting the technology but understanding how it reshapes creativity, authorship and learning itself. In this episode, he warns that AI’s speed and ease risk eroding the critical ‘friction’ where real thinking happens, especially in art and design education, where creativity is a process not a prompt. Rather than focusing on outputs, Gaëtan advocates for teaching methods built on iteration, comparison and reflection. As AI-generated content floods the internet and even writing assignments lose reliability as measures of understanding, our conversation suggests education must pivot toward process-based learning, in-person dialogue and new evaluation frameworks. So if AI is becoming free and ubiquitous, what is college for? Education must reinvent itself, and designers, in particular, must step up not just as creators, but as critical voices shaping how AI integrates into society.
Special note: This episode coincides with an upcoming symposium: Teaching AI: Art and Design Education Under Automation. The event is online April 15 and 16th and is free to attend.
Gaëtan Robillard is an artist, designer, and researcher working at the intersection of AI, generative media, and contemporary art. He is an Assistant Professor for Computational Visual Design at The Ohio State University. His internationally exhibited work explores themes like cognition, climate, and misinformation through immersive, computational environments. A former postdoctoral researcher with Arcanes in Montréal and a Ph.D. graduate of Université Paris 8, he has received major honors including awards from SIGGRAPH, the Lumen Prize, and the European STARTS Prize. He has taught for over a decade in France, focusing on AI in art and design, creative coding, and media theory.
You can also listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts.
