THE ECHO

By Nikola Meissner // Managing Editor

As you walk through the halls of Avon High School, you notice flyers filling the walls promoting clubs, sports, and other various activities for students to participate in. Some of these flyers are filling with color, life, and effort, while others are just AI Slop.

Junior Lilly Spenos recalls walking through K-hall and spotting on the TV an AI promotion for the football game that Friday.

“It isn’t appealing,” Spenos said. “You could tell that it was AI and it truly made me want to go to the game even less.”

But the athletic AI promotional pieces don’t just stop there, she says. An Instagram account in association with Avon, frequently uses AI in their posts to make generative photos of the people in charge of the account or to just make basic title cards for their videos.

“It’s really hard to see AI being used for art in a school that’s filled with artists,” Spenos said.

Spenos thinks that the use of AI for these posters diminishes the other clubs who put real effort into making their posters. Senior Bailey Prock agrees that the people making these AI posters aren’t utilizing the student body like they should be.

“In my AP Studio Art class, there are plenty of talented artists who could recreate those posters,” Prock said. “There’s no reason to use AI to make posters when real people could do it and make it look better.”

Prock says that the AI use isn’t just limited to sloppy posters, but she also sees her peers using it for their everyday classwork. She says she notices her peers using it for the simplest tasks, and even some teachers are advising the use of it.

“Every day in my math class, my teacher suggests that we use AI to solve our homework,” Prock said.

Her teacher suggests they use it to check their work if they’re unsure of what to do next or where they made a mistake, she says. However, Prock is noticing left and right that students are just using it to do their work entirely for them instead of putting in any effort at all.

“I think it’s bringing down people’s work ethic,” Prock said. “They know that AI will just do it for them and so they take the easy way out, and their scores reflect that.”

Prock thinks that AI just genuinely should not be in school; however, Senior Caleb Zeronik thinks that AI is okay some of the time, but it shouldn’t be the driving force behind students’ work.

“I use AI for smaller things every now and again,” Zeronik said. “But I don’t think people should be using it for just anything.”

Zeronik shared distress over the overuse of AI for posters, especially by the Avon Athletics department. He said that he thinks there should be more effort behind creating the poster and that it’s creating a negative environment around the posters.

“Canva is free,” Zeronik said. “There are tutorials for making posters, and a YouTube video if you still need more help.”

The posters are putting a negative light on our school, Zeronik said. He says that sharing AI posts in association with Avon schools makes the school look incompetent and lazy.

“It needs to come to a stop,” Zeronik said. “It paints the school district as an AI endorser, which the students know that it’s not. If AI isn’t permitted on schoolwork, then we shouldn’t be posting with it either.”

AI usage in all Avon High School should be prohibited, Zeronik shared. There is too much talent and education being wasted by using AI, Spenos added.

“We should be utilizing our people,” Spenos said. “Not robots.”