Walk through the second floor or log onto the Flight Deck on the school’s Google homepage, and you will surely see it: the glossy, hyper-saturated and slightly off-putting imagery of artificial intelligence. From historical posters to digital banners, Central’s visual identity has been handed over to a machine. While administration might view this as a cost-effective way to look high-tech, it feels more like a dismissal of the real talent currently sitting in our classrooms.

The decision to use AI-generated art for school-wide messaging is a massive missed opportunity. High school is supposed to be a place where students develop their skills, find their voices and build their creative portfolios. By choosing an algorithm over a student artist, Central is essentially hinting that a computer-generated image is more valuable than the hours of labor, skill and heart that a student provides.

Our school is home to dozens of talented artists who would jump at the chance to see their work displayed as posters on the second-floor walls or the Google homepage. These students understand our school’s culture, our inside jokes and our daily struggles in a way that AI never will. When a student creates a poster, it serves as a functional piece of community-building. It means something because a peer made it. When a computer does it, it’s just visual noise, hollow and disconnected from the people who actually learn and work here.

There is also a glaring irony in this choice. In our classrooms, we are constantly warned about the ethical dangers of AI and the importance of academic integrity. We are told that using AI to do our work for us is a shortcut that fundamentally hurts our learning. Yet, when it comes time for the school to produce its own content, they bypass human creators in favor of the very technology they tell us to be wary of. This “do as I say, not as I do” approach makes it hard to take those warnings seriously as students. It undermines the value of the arts and suggests that creativity is something that can be automated whenever it is convenient.

Furthermore, AI art is often identifiable by its lack of soul. It relies on patterns and scraped data to mimic what it thinks “inspiration” looks like. Our school deserves better than a cheap imitation. We deserve art that was sketched in a notebook during lunch, refined in the digital arts lab and finished with the pride of a student who can point to a wall and say, “I made that.” 

It is time for the administration to close the AI tabs and open the classroom doors. We should give the second-floor walls back to the students and let the Flight Deck be a gallery for genuine talent. Let’s invest in the humans who actually attend this school rather than the servers that host its homepage.