We Must All Be Artists Now
How to Thrive in the World of AI

As part of my contribution to this year's Computala exhibition, I presented the latest version of my statement about the creative uses of Artificial Intelligence. This is something of an ongoing reflection on how I think AI needs to be seen and utilised effectively and creatively to amplify human creativity. It is something I have developed as part of my reflections on both my own creative practice, my growing use of AI, and my experiences teaching in China, where AI has been fully adopted by students as part of their approach to learning. This current version of the statement is the basis for a paper I will present at this year's EVA London conference in July 2026.

STEM→ STEAM → STEA²M

For over 15 years, I have actively worked to integrate the Arts into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths (STEM to STEAM) teaching with young people in the UK and China. This work began with a belief that artistic approaches could meaningfully inform technical training and that technical disciplines could, in turn, enrich artistic practice. More recently, I have come to realise that in a world saturated by AI, artistic approaches to problem-solving are not merely valuable, but essential. They provide ways of thinking that resist automation, standardisation, and purely instrumental notions of efficiency.

Indeed, to thrive in a world increasingly shaped by AI and robotics, we all need to think more like artists. This does not mean that everyone must become a professional practitioner in the arts, but that we must cultivate an artistic way of engaging with the world: one grounded in curiosity, experimentation, reflection, and a willingness to question assumptions. It also requires rejecting the idea that the technologies we use are neutral, inevitable, or fixed. Every tool carries values, biases, and intentions, and part of thinking like an artist is learning to recognise, interrogate, and reconfigure those forces rather than passively accepting them.

We must learn to value play, not as a distraction, but as a serious mode of inquiry. Play enables us to test possibilities, invent problems, and explore alternative futures without needing immediate justification or utility. Alongside this, we need processes of making that are structured and knowledge-led, yet open enough to accommodate chance, interpretation, and imagination. It is within this tension between structure and openness that genuinely new ideas emerge.

As humans, we possess lived experience, embodied perception, memory, culture, and situated knowledge that cannot be replicated or truly inhabited by machines. Even as AI systems grow more sophisticated, they do not experience the world; they process representations of it. Our unique perspectives allow us to interpret, contextualise, and reflect in ways that are inseparable from our histories and our physical and social existence. No matter how persuasive claims about machine understanding may become, this fundamental distinction remains.

If we are to take meaningful control of our future, we must focus on what differentiates us from AI rather than competing with it on its own terms. Our capacities for critical thinking, ethical judgement, empathy, and self-reflection arenot secondary qualities — they are central. So too are authenticity and integrity: the ability to stand behind our choices, to articulate why we make what we make, and to accept responsibility for the consequences.

Thinking like an artist, then, is not a luxury for a cultural elite. It is becoming a necessary survival skill. By embracing artistic modes of thinking, we can use technology as a material for expression, inquiry, and amplification of human values — rather than allowing it to become a substitute for them. In doing so, we assert that the future is not something that simply happens to us, but something we actively shape.

When I present my work, I often expand on these ideas through concrete examples drawn from both my teaching and my artistic practice. I continue to argue that the long-standing STEAM model now needs to be reconsidered: the “A” should no longer stand only for Art, but for Art and AI. Not as a collapse of the two into a single category, but as a recognition that artistic ways of thinking must actively shape how AI is understood, taught, and used. Only then can STEAM function as a genuinely human-centred framework for education in the age of intelligent machines.

Sean Clark
February 2026