Teaching Creative Technology in the Age of AI

It’s been a strange and disorienting time to teach creative technology. Since the arrival of LLMs and generative AI tools, educators have had to reconsider not just which tools belong in the classroom, but what learning, authorship, experimentation, and understanding mean in the first place.

In this panel, facilitator Lai Yi Ohlsen was joined by Sam Lavigne, Carrie Sijia Wang, Tommy Martinez, and Nancy Dayanne Valladares for a conversation about teaching creative tech while the technologies themselves are reshaping creativity in real time.

Together, they considered questions many educators, students, and practitioners are confronting right now: How should generative AI show up in creative curricula? What does responsible use look like? How do we demonstrate these tools without encouraging copy-paste habits or outsourcing the work of learning? And how might the choices we make now shape classrooms, creative practice, and the field for years to come?

Rather than offering easy answers or prescriptive next steps, the discussion opened up space for a shared understanding of where we are in this moment. and what it means to keep teaching, making, and learning through it.

This is the debut episode of IRL @ INDEX, a video series with live events about paying attention and imagining what's to come in the world of technology, design and culture.

Filmed on February 17, 2026 at Index Chinatown, NYC.

Produced by Drew Marshall
Edited by Alex Bliss
Music by RAMZi