Assembled visual creativity: generative AI, symbiotic authorship, and critical visual literacy in higher education

The rapid proliferation of generative AI image tools has destabilized foundational assumptions about authorship, skill, and aesthetic value in visual education, yet existing theoretical frameworks offer inadequate guidance for educators navigating this shift. This article proposes assembled visual creativity as a transdisciplinary framework for understanding and teaching AI-mediated image-making in higher education. Drawing on agential realism, critical posthumanism, assemblage theory, and decolonial AI studies, the framework reconceptualizes visual creativity as emergent and distributed across heterogeneous human-nonhuman configurations. Through transdisciplinary theoretical synthesis of 26 relevant sources, three interrelated dimensions are identified—(1) hybrid ontologies of image-making, (2) the politics of algorithmic aesthetics, and (3) symbiotic pedagogical ecologies—and organized into a synthesis framework. Three educational implications are developed: curriculum redesign, critical assessment practice, and equity-centered algorithmic literacy. The article contributes a conceptual vocabulary for integrating generative AI into visual education without prohibitionist or uncritically celebratory stances.