As a neurodivergent arts therapist, I’m often exploring new tools and processes to work with in healing ways.

These holidays, I’ve been exploring ways to use AI to illustrate my values, passions and self-care, to see if I can come up with new therapeutic art processes to share within my practice, profession and beyond.

*Above: ‘My AI Boundaries Cow’*
*Prompts from my poetry: Notice little joys. Avert from harm. No more extra chances or pretending.*

🎨 My Process - How I use AI in Arts Therapy:

Step 1: To start, I upload prompts of my values/poetry into the AI text box (I use the ChatBox AI app). For my prompts, I typed in my interests and themes that support my wellbeing including: LEGO, art, love, boundaries, plants, autism, ADHD and spaciousness, alongside my needs for healing my heart after a breakup.

Step 2: Choose an AI image style - I felt the Modelling clay or Isometric Art styles would suit my therapeutic prompts best.

Step 3: Once AI has conjured up images, I carefully sift through the imagery to find compositions that speak to my inner experience somehow … maybe through resonance or noticing what I need to change in the image, to have more or less of.

Step 4: I make adjustments to the AI image prompts until the resulting image feels juuuuust right - or close to just right. For example, more spacious, more organic shapes, less cluttered.

Step 5: I place the images with my poetry, or prompts, or in a document/folder/post-it-notes.

Step 6 for further inquiry: After choosing the AI images I most resonated with … I might recreate one image without AI, for example, with LEGO or clay or another round of poetry.

These are the images that came from my values inquiry.

Above: ‘Storying My AI Values’

Prompts from my values: LEGO, art, love, boundaries, plants, autism, ADHD, spaciousness, healing my heart after a breakup.

In this way, I’m using AI as a tool for self-care, understanding and witnessing my needs and values reflected back to me, in alternative visual forms that I would not necessarily conjure up myself.

Multi/modality is a key process in experiencing concepts from different perspectives. So from my perspective, using AI as an image creation tool, offers incredible possibilities for visual-based therapies, regardless of artistic skill level or confidence.

🎨Ethical considerations in using AI in Arts Therapy:

I understand that AI imagery can be a controversial topic amongst artists in terms of our intellectual property rights … I am an artist too, so I value my creative community.

However, having just completed a Masters in Therapeutic Arts Research, I have come to know the value of open scholarship and building on ideas from others.

I value collective healing and widening access to arts-based therapies with people who need time to lean into hands-on art, due to sensory/physcial/intellectual disabilities and personal preferences.