When universities advocate GAI but practice falls short: student appraisals and creative process engagement in art education

Introduction: Universities are increasingly promoting generative artificial intelligence (GAI) in art education; however, institutional advocacy is not always matched by consistent implementation. Drawing on the transactional theory of stress and coping, this study examines how GAI advocacy-practice inconsistency relates to art students' creative process engagement through challenge and hindrance appraisals and whether pathways thinking shapes these processes. Methods: A two-study design was employed. Study 1 employed a classroom-based between-subjects scenario experiment involving 160 art students to compare challenge and hindrance appraisals under high- and low-inconsistency conditions. Study 2 surveyed 425 students with recent experience of GAI-assisted art learning and tested the proposed direct, indirect, moderating, and conditional indirect relationships using PLS-SEM. Results: In Study 1, participants in the high-inconsistency scenario reported stronger challenge and hindrance appraisals than those in the low-inconsistency scenario, although the manipulation captured a broader experience of inconsistent implementation rather than an isolated word-deed inconsistency effect. In Study 2, inconsistency showed a significant negative indirect association with creative process engagement through hindrance appraisal and a significant positive indirect association through challenge appraisal. Pathways thinking strengthened the association between inconsistency and challenge appraisal and the corresponding positive conditional indirect association, but did not significantly weaken either the hindrance appraisal relationship or the negative indirect pathway. Discussion: Institutional inconsistency does not produce a uniform student response; instead, it can be interpreted simultaneously as an obstacle and as a manageable developmental demand, with opposing implications for creative engagement. The findings extend research on institutional word-deed alignment to GAI-supported art education and identify pathways thinking as a resource that facilitates challenge-oriented interpretation without eliminating awareness of genuine institutional constraints. Universities should align GAI commitments with teaching, assessment, and support practices while helping students develop alternative routes for coping with implementation uncertainty.