Becoming With AI : Identity and Meaning-Making Among Graduate Students in Creative Disciplines

Sammanfattning

This study examines how graduate students in creative and digital disciplines come to understand themselves as professionals while learning to work with artificial intelligence tools. As automation gains ground in creative practice, the focus here is not just on what students use, but on how these tools influence their sense of legitimacy, authorship, and what it means to belong in their field. Grounded in the frameworks of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology and Professional Identity Theory, the study uses qualitative methods to explore these questions. Through semi-structured interviews with graduate students in Sweden, it traces points where identity and technology intersect, often subtly, sometimes uncomfortably, during a critical stage in professional formation. At the heart of this study lies a central question: How does using AI tools shape graduate students’ perceptions of their future professional identity in the creative and digital industries? To explore this, it considers how students perceive AI's influence on roles in the industry, how they believe it might affect creative expression and individuality, and what skills they consider essential for working with AI. It also examines how prepared they feel to apply those skills in future careers.What emerges is a complex picture. For many, AI tools feel both promising and unsettling. They offer new possibilities, but also raise doubts about where the line lies between enhancement and replacement. Students speak of gains in efficiency, but also of questions about ownership, voice, and what counts as “real” creative work. Rather than treating AI as a neutral add-on, the study suggests it acts more like a mirror, reflecting and reframing how students see future roles. It argues that tools like these carry their own logic and assumptions, which shape how creative professionals define themselves and their work. In this way, the project contributes to Media and Communication Studies by connecting theories of technological uptake to deeper currents of identity-making in creative education.