Ctrl + Alt + Crit: Comprehensive Strategies and Considerations for AI in Assessment & Feedback in Art, Design & Creative Disciplines

This paper presents a framework for rethinking assessment and feedback in the context of generative AI, with a particular focus on Art, Design and Creative (ADC) disciplines. Framing Ctrl + Alt + Crit as a deliberate reworking of the familiar “reset” command, the work argues that AI’s rapid integration into student practice demands proactive structural redesign of pedagogy rather than reactive bans or surveillance. It identifies three key tensions intensified by AI: Automation versus Authenticity, Standardisation versus Speculation, and Output versus Process, and positions ADC disciplines as a critical test site for the wider sector, where AI can already produce artefacts that resemble competent student work.
The presentation proposes the educator as a “critical AI guide”, responsible for fostering sophisticated AI literacy encompassing authorship, ethics, bias and unconsented labour. Crucially, it calls on institutions to move beyond policy statements and invest in sustained staff development: allocating time, resource and recognition for experimentation, collaborative inquiry and discipline specific adaptation of assessment and feedback practices. It outlines concrete strategies that centre process, judgement and ethical reasoning, including the critique of AI outputs, assessment through “messy” real world briefs, the reinstatement of defended moments such as crits, vivas and pitches, and accountable, granular reflection. The session concludes with a sector level call to redesign assessment around process, agency and ethics, and to build institutional cultures that actively support staff to explore, question and shape AI mediated learning environments.