On April 27, Carmel Clay Schools posted a video on its Instagram asking seniors how the art department had impacted them, highlighting the strengths of the art program at this school and the diverse skillset it’s produced. Yet, when it comes to official posters and messaging, the school continues to outsource work not to these artists, but rather, AI.

AI has become the face of school to student communication. Senior celebration reminders and prom advertisements have been generated exclusively through AI. Flyers in the media center promoting new books are littered with AI artifacts, and across this school, posters that appear to be generic mental health infographics reveal AI hallucinations upon closer examination. In one case, on a poster titled “Your Brain Needs a Bathroom Break Too”, a sentence even reads “Not using your phone can accelera dementi, yer reading delay it.”

Beyond depreciating student creativity, AI-generated flyers, specifically as they pertain to social awareness, depersonalize and distract from the message at hand. These low-quality infographics demonstrate that even the people supposedly concerned about student mental health couldn’t bother to take the time to properly research, fact-check and compile advice that would actually benefit the student body. Even a downscaled, human-made flyer with simpler graphics would read as a more genuine effort to encourage healthy habits than the slop currently plastered on the doors of every bathroom stall throughout the school. AI generated posters undermine the purpose of mental health broadcasting at large. 

While these posters were likely created by a student or a club, the school assumes some responsibility for them. These posters don’t help students who have social media addictions, but instead they set a precedent for students: AI is allowed and encouraged. Students seeing these posters may think “if AI is good enough to be prominently featured across the school, it’s good enough to write my essays or do my schoolwork.” The administration should encourage students to use resources like Canva premium, which the school actively pays for, and students’ own creativity instead of AI for these infographics and posters.

The school has hundreds of talented artists in fields from painting to photography to graphic design. Their work is displayed in galleries throughout the year, their expertise showcased across club posters and locker signs, and by and large, it is the work of student artists that makes CHS beautiful and unique. Rather than polluting the halls with more AI generated graphics, the school should take advantage of its artistic resources, or at the very least, make a return to human effort in managing student communication.