Students and staff weigh in on the pros and cons of AI-generated images

By Bristol Grant

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere from our social media feed to the Google search bar. AI has even found itself tacked to the walls of Eisenhower High.

Travis Rink is the assistant principal at Eisenhower. Rink likes to use AI for posters and informational sheets around the school, such as the Ike After Hours posters or the posters outside the office for National School Counseling Week.

Rink uses AI two to three times a day and said that AI is very useful for people who “are less inclined at graphic design”. 

“People in education need to do a better job of adapting to the tools AI provides and learning how to teach the proper use of AI,” Rink said.

Rink added that AI has been around for a lot longer than people think. Caldwell University pinpointed the beginning of AI research in the '40s and '50s. Rink compared people’s fear of AI to the beginning of the internet.

But artist and EHS Senior Joey White thinks that AI is too powerful already. 

“It takes away original thought,” White said. “People don't think for themselves anymore. “They just rely on AI.”

White says this reliance on AI for anything and everything will interfere with his future job as a tattoo artist.  Eisenhower business and graphic design teacher, Kristen Salazar, agrees.

“There's a fine line, you just can't say [AI generated images are] an original work of art if you used AI,” Salazar said.

Salazar believes AI is great as an idea starter but not as a digital backbone. 

“To me, if you are putting your work in [AI] to kind of polish it up, OK, but if you're just throwing something in [AI] just to take the easy way out of not doing the work, then ethically, that's probably not OK,” Salazar said.

White also mentioned that AI takes a lot of the Earth’s resources to function. To train one new AI model and deploy it to the public takes the same amount of power as 120 average US homes in a year according to MIT.  At the rate of a new model a week, the electricity strain is a lot bigger than that of the average technology. Every kilowatt of energy takes two, chilled liters of water to cool the server. 

Whether you are pro or con AI, it’s becoming more and more a part of everyone’s lives.

“I think AI’s that next big revolution,” Rink said. “It's here to stay. “It's only going to continue to advance and make things more useful and powerful.”