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Kim first conducted this study in a sketching course at Kansas State University. He has since adopted the same format at NC State, where he currently leads a similar workshop that teaches students to use a popular industrial design tool, Vizcom AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For one workshop, industrial design students were tasked to create a salt-and-pepper grinder set. In another, architecture students had to design shared spaces inside a dormitory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
With both groups, Kim began by teaching students to communicate their ideas visually with hand-drawn sketches on paper to establish design intent without digital assistance. Then students uploaded their original sketches to Vizcom AI, which rendered them into photorealistic digital images. As part of the exercise, Kim asked students to generate 11 different images by incrementally increasing AI’s influence from 10% to 100%.<\/p>\n\n\n Afterward, students completed surveys assessing their comfort with the tool and their sense of ownership of the AI-generated designs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While Kim continues collecting data for a forthcoming paper, patterns have emerged from the numerous workshops he has led. So far, he has found that most students claim ownership of their designs, but surveys reveal a critical threshold: when AI influence exceeds roughly 50% \u2014 representing a “tipping point” \u2014 students feel the designs no longer belong to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Below that threshold, students maintain their sense of authorship as long as at least half of their original sketch remains visible. Beyond it, their sense of ownership over the work begins to erode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kim’s driving question is straightforward: How will educators like him prepare students for professional design in the age of AI?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In informal post-workshop conversations, he asks students about their comfort with AI tools. Their responses reveal a range of attitudes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Some students are really conservative in their use of AI,” Kim said. “They prefer to create the designs themselves and feel a sense of craftsmanship. They want to reach a certain point with their creativity, then use AI to refine it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Others embrace the technology enthusiastically. “Some are very excited about AI because they want to learn to be more effective as designers,” Kim said.<\/p>\n\n\n This divide defines Kim’s pedagogical challenge \u2014 helping students navigate their wariness of AI while also preparing them for an industry that increasingly expects fluency with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For hesitant students, Kim reframes AI as an assistant rather than a replacement. “I encourage them to use the tools as a kind of assistant or tutor, because what AI tools are good at in my field is handling a 2D sketch,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vizcom AI’s settings, for instance, can be adjusted to preserve students’ original sketches while helping them visualize ways to strengthen their designs and concepts.<\/p>\n\n\n \u00a0“I encourage them to use AI tools as a kind of assistant or tutor.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Student concerns extend beyond authorship to job security and satisfaction \u2014 anxieties that mirror broader industry upheaval. In fact, Kim\u2019s research was inspired by an article he read about concept artists in film and animation who began changing their job titles after AI integration transformed their responsibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “[These concept artists] really liked their jobs,” Kim said. “But after AI is integrated, it’s more like they are just coordinating generated AI images and then retouching them. It’s more efficient. But their job satisfaction level decreased because that’s not what they wanted to do.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Debates on AI tend to focus on whether using intellectual property to train machine learning violates copyright laws. In November 2025, for example, the famed Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli demanded that OpenAI cease using its films to train AI \u2014 a response to an image generator that went viral as users created cartoons of themselves in the style of My Neighbor Totoro.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Kim’s research approaches the AI debate from a different angle: how does the technology impact artists, designers and their creative processes? The question is an ethical one, with broader implications on the well-being \u2014 or the potential human cost \u2014 of AI.<\/p>\n\n\n If using AI decreases creative satisfaction or accomplishment, why use it? Put another way: why rely on technology for work that people actually want<\/em> to do? <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIdeally, from a utilitarian point of view, you want to do actions that increase human happiness \u2014 not just individual, but for all parties concerned as a result of the action,\u201d said William A. Bauer, an associate teaching professor of philosophy at NC State.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Utilitarianism, which seeks to promote the well-being of the greatest number of people while causing the least harm, is one of the philosophical frameworks that Bauer and an interdisciplinary team of faculty \u2014 including Kim \u2014 use to examine AI’s social impacts through NC State’s Centering AI in Society and Ethics (CASE) Initiative<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/news.ncsu.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/JPG_tea-kettle-renderings.jpg\")
<\/a>Opportunity and Caution<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Happiness: The Human Cost of AI?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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