The hypocrisy of AI use by our school

Disclaimer: None of the posters in this article have been confirmed to be AI.

Recently, Anthropic AI employee Jacob Coxon resigned from his job as a researcher, and took to Twitter with a note warning AI (Artificial Intelligence) users that the technology might be advancing faster than we think. Meanwhile, AI data centers are polluting the water and causing disturbances in the nearby towns and cities while businesses and companies defaulting to have AI take over more work are putting thousands of human workers out of jobs. The increasing presence of AI in the classroom is also tanking test scores.

And how is our school reacting to this? By making posters for events that are AI-generated.

Despite the LAUSD school district's banning AI use in school for all students, our school has begun making event flyers with generative AI. For example, this swim team poster was sent out on the second week of school. This poster is pretty clearly AI (look at the A in team). The problem with this is, if there is a person considering joining the swim team who is very anti-AI, this kind of poster could potentially turn them off of being on the team.

The same goes for this World Fit For Kids futsal poster, which is also blatantly AI.

I could go on for a while about the other things that they've made with AI (I'm looking at you, Oinkster waterpolo sticker), but the main thing that irks me about this is our school's AI policies. None of the students are allowed to use AI for any school related work, but if the same doesn't apply to the staff of our school, it comes off as a bit hypocritical.

Some of the posters are less noticeably generated than others, but we can definitely still tell.

A big argument that you might hear about using AI to generate these kinds of things are that it makes it faster, but we managed to make this kind of poster for a long time before image generation was a thing. You could make a quick poster on Canva or Google Slides in a few minutes if you use a template instead of using AI. 

 Nobody needs the poster for a fire drill or anything else to be an artistic masterpiece, but using AI instead of making a poster yourself can reflect badly on what you're trying to communicate.