As a practicing clinician, George Washington University Associate Professor of Art Therapy Jordan Potash has seen artificial intelligence (AI) paint near masterpieces.
Through a National Institutes of Health (NIH) pilot program, he’s used the technology to help clients with disabilities generate expressive images when they can’t manipulate pencils, paintbrushes or cursors on a computer screen.
In one case, Potash guided a client through AI prompts as they recreated a powerful memory: a slumbering dog comforting him during a storm. The AI scenes weren’t perfect. But after some trial and error, the client hit on an image that moved him. “It conveyed the emotion of the memory,” Potash said.
But not all AI images are therapeutic Picassos, Potash has found. Another client asked AI to present a joyful scene of a person in a wheelchair petting a horse. The bot brought back a horse—but it had two heads.
“I don’t think AI is going to take over the world if it doesn’t know horse anatomy,” Potash laughed. Like other art therapy tools, Potash said AI can be a means “to tell your story, express a feeling, imagine a possibility. But it obviously has its advantages and disadvantages.”
For better or worse, AI is changing the face of American education. In classrooms throughout the country—and throughout GW—educators are turning to AI platforms for refining lesson plans, highlighting new perspectives and helping students sharpen writing, research and critical thinking skills.
Potash, and other faculty in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences (CCAS), are among those at GW embracing AI’s learning and research potential.
For example, Alexa Alice Joubin, a professor in the Department of English, uses AI platforms to let students imagine Romeo and Juliet in different lights—from Victorian interpretations to Black and queer casting. Professorial Philosophy Lecturer Megan Davis trained an AI chatbot to engage students in Socratic method dialogues. Joseph McDonald, an adjunct professor of communication, plans AI student activities that mimic workplace scenarios—like presentations, public speaking and team management exercises.
“I am on fire with how AI resources are changing the way I teach and present my class concepts to our students,” McDonald said.
Teach Anything
And now Joubin, a self-proclaimed AI “early adopter,” is sparking what she calls a “grass roots revolution” with a new platform called Teach Anything. Developed with former computer science graduate student Akhilesh Ghanshyambhai Rangani, MA ’26, Teach Anything allows academics to design and create their own AI applications—customized chatbots tailored to their specific classroom needs.
Teach Anything “lets professors turn their own course materials into an AI teaching assistant for their class,” said Rangani, now a founding engineer at Tambo AI. “Instead of a generic chatbot that answers everything, the assistant is limited to what the professor provides. Students can ask questions, and the AI responds based only on the course content, not outside sources.”
Since launching Teach Anything in January, Joubin has already shared the free resource with 15 GW faculty members—including Davis and McDonald—and 250 professors worldwide. Joubin’s “approach to using AI tools is transformational,” McDonald said.” She is opening up avenues that inspire students to think in astoundingly creative ways.”
Joubin said the open-accessed Teach Anything avoids the data privacy and image sourcing pitfalls surrounding commercial products—a concern for scholars like Potash who worry about client confidentiality. Joubin stressed that Teach Anything employs only open-sourced large language models (LLMs). It is prohibited from being used for profit or commercial services. Students are not required to have accounts and the platform doesn’t store data.
Joubin thinks of Teach Anything as a digital sandbox— “Built by educators for educators”—where AI-hesitant faculty can get their hands dirty. “It is like a playground,” she said. “We are giving [professors] a controlled space to experiment.”
A seat at the table
Despite his AI apprehension, Potash saw the interdisciplinary NIH-funded project—which partners with the GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences and primary investigator Qing Zeng, director of the Biomedical Informatics Center—as an opportunity to expand the frontiers of art therapy. Since its founding in 1971, the CCAS Art Therapy program, one of the first of its kind in the country, has been consistently recognized as an innovator. “The idea that we are still pushing our profession forward is exciting,” Potash said.
As part of the project, Potash taught a summer 2025 course in which 10 GW art therapy students were paired with clients from the Specially Adapted Resource Centers (SPARC) in Virginia. The students guided people with profound disabilities through writing prompts as they generated AI images in therapy sessions. The class is currently completing a manuscript detailing what Potash called “one of the few research examples of AI art making in art therapy.”
The project raised larger questions about the ethics of inserting AI into therapeutic settings. Students debated whether AI art is a “shortcut to creativity,” Potash said, noting that art therapy is as much about the experience of making art as the results. “The creative process is a way to work through one’s ideas, express oneself, come up against challenges, recognize new strengths,” he said. “The struggle is part of it.”
Still, Potash sees the potential for expanding AI-aided art therapy among clients like veterans and people with Parkinson’s disease and cognitive or physical limitations. And while he still has reservations, he plans to stay engaged in the discussion.
“I could foresee a situation…where we as a field have to react to [AI] as opposed to helping shape it around those intentional and ethical considerations,” he said. “I want to be at the table having those conversations.”