VIRTUAL MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is transforming animation and VFX education, with students grappling with their future relevance. Industry discourse often frames AI in terms of job loss or augmentation, yet both treat AI as a tool for extraction and efficiency. As higher education becomes increasingly shaped by vocational and market pressures, emerging technologies risk being adopted for relevance alone, at the expense of deeper creative learning, critical thinking, and ethical reflection. This paper presents a practice-led inquiry into relational human–AI workflows within studio-based animation education. It centres on the creation of Split, a Rotuman story on how to navigate power and conflict with collective relational intelligence. The animated film will be crafted entirely without AI, alongside a structured AI experimentation track, both in collaboration with Indigenous Rotuman filmmaker and academic Professor Vilsoni Hereniko. The encounter is the instrument that reveals the nature, value and limits of each method as well as how they shape creative thinking, intent and authorship. The making process is the primary site of research. Relationality is examined at multiple levels: within the human creative process, between collaborators across cultural difference, and at the level of AI and human collaboration within the animation production workflow. Studio-based workshops explore AI-assisted practice, generating student reflection on creative agency, ethical concerns, and learning. Can human–AI workflows scaffold challenge, feedback, and iteration in ways that support engagement with more complex creative problems or will the scaffold become a crutch? Does AI’s opacity restrict critical engagement and polarise students around ethics? Yet their scepticism is grounded in observable precedent within extractive cultures. The creative process builds judgment and capability, sensitivity to consequence is earned through experience. If this is bypassed, what is at stake?