An Art Therapist's Companion to Understanding AI: Emerging Approaches Learning, Creativity, and Well-Being in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

This book offers a comprehensive guide for art therapists and adjacent mental health professionals navigating artificial intelligence, exploring both current and potential applications of AI in creative arts therapies practice, pedagogy, and research. Before recovering from the pandemic's impact on mental health, the wide adoption of generative AI in the last few years has significantly changed human connection and behavior and challenged many art therapists and adjacent mental health professionals. This book offers a first-time comprehensive overview of both current and potential applications of AI in expressive arts therapy practice, pedagogy, and research while acknowledging AI's impact on learning, creating, connecting, and healing. The book consists of three parts that describe foundational knowledge and ethics related to art therapy, AI use in art therapy education and assessments, and AI applications in arts-based inquiry, intervention, and innovation. Diverse scholars and practitioners across art therapy and related fields explore AI's therapeutic, educational, and research potentials and pitfalls by using rich case examples, interviews, emerging research, and theoretical frameworks. As these powerful generative AI tools challenge the boundaries of creativity and transform the ways we work and communicate, this volume initiates conversations about ethics, access, risks, limitations, and opportunities, while calling art therapists to be discerning as well as more involved in designing tech and its policies. This book is an essential resource for all practitioners and learners who use the arts as a means of growth and healing in a rapidly changing technological landscape.