How Creative Generative AI Can Help Higher Education Institutions

What Is Creative Generative AI, and Where Does It Fit in Higher Ed?

When incorporated into visual content creation tools such as Adobe Express, Acrobat and Creative Cloud apps, generative AI “expands ways to communicate information, whether it’s creating visuals that help to illustrate a concept or support a story that you’re trying to tell,” Johnsrud says.

For students, creative generative AI also enhances creative thinking and problem-solving itself — “the ability to ideate, to brainstorm, to see alternative solutions and different ways of communicating ideas,” Johnsrud adds. “You have a creative assistant that can help you rapidly generate different concepts to find the ones that best represent your unique idea.”

Faculty can benefit as well.

“Every campus leader or faculty member I speak to first wants to start with AI literacy, ethics and responsibility,” Johnsrud says. Models designed responsibly, such as Adobe Firefly, include “curricula and resources around content authenticity and media literacy to help campuses take their first steps in curricula integration in a thoughtful way that respects academic integrity.”

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How Adobe Helps Colleges and Universities Incorporate AI

Generative AI is integrated into various Adobe offerings. For example, the Adobe AI Assistant for Acrobat helps faculty and students to summarize, synthesize and understand large amounts of information in PDFs and other documents. From course readings to academic research papers to literature reviews, deep reading and critical analysis of texts can be streamlined and made more accessible to broader audiences.

On the visual side, there’s Adobe Firefly, a family of generative AI tools for visual creation. When users provide a text prompt describing a concept or scene, Firefly “generates three or four different examples that you can start with, and then, as a creative tool, allows you to refine your prompt and creation with design-focused tools to adjust the look and feel until it perfectly matches what you had imagined,” Johnsrud says.

In support of higher education leaders’ concerns about the appropriate use of intellectual property, the first version of Adobe Firefly was trained on Adobe Stock, openly licensed content and public domain content where the copyright has expired so that creations are safe for commercial use.

“Our tools are designed to be safe and trusted in education,” Johnsrud says. For instance, Adobe does not include student projects from K–12 and higher education institutions in training data sets, and there are guardrails on generative AI prompts and outputs encouraging appropriate student use.

Firefly is integrated into Adobe’s commercial and professional tools, including Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, as well as easy design tools such as cloud-based Adobe Express. For colleges and universities, that makes generative AI capabilities readily available and ensures that students are learning on the tools they’ll use in their professional lives.

“By incorporating Firefly into our tools, we’re opening this up for every person to have that much more power over telling their own story,” Johnsrud says. “If a student has a great idea for a project, a hobby or even a business, they don’t have to wait to become a professional designer to bring it to life.”

Next Steps for Planning to Incorporate Creative Generative AI

For universities looking to see campus and student outcomes as a result of a creative generative AI toolset, Johnsrud offers some practical guidance.

“Administrators know that this technology is not going away,” he says, “but neither is the fact that creative thinking is the most in-demand skill for job seekers today. So, we partner with campuses to think about how the curricula and the overall campus experience can give students more practice in creative thinking and sample projects or portfolios to show their progression and demonstrate their skills.”

Johnsrud encourages faculty members to start small, by assigning students a creative generative AI task in a single assignment, for example. Especially in these early days, faculty should also be looking for ways to assess the process as much as the outcome.

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“You can have the students reflect on what they’ve done: What idea did you start with? What did you try? How did it evolve?” Johnsrud says. “We want the students to be able to understand and communicate their creative process in how they get to solutions or bring compelling ideas to life.”

For faculty willing to experiment, he adds, visual generative AI can deliver even bigger rewards.

“As educators, we’re constantly trying to find new ways to keep students engaged and find a sense of meaning and purpose in what they’re studying. Many students find that creating and innovating something gives them that sense of purpose — academically, personally and in careers,” Johnsrud says. With this in mind, incorporating visual AI tools into the curriculum “gives students early exposure to the kinds of purposeful activities and careers that could await them in this new age of AI.”

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