AI posters at an arts school? Students call it out
Walk past the bulletin boards at St. Thomas University (STU) and you’ll find flyers for gigs, art shows and local bands. Some of them, made by a machine instead of a hand.
For a school built on fine arts, humanities and critical thinking, for some students that’s not sitting well.
“I find it kind of contradictory,” said Gabriel Bartlett, a history major with a minor in fine arts and anthropology.
“[The] majority of the students I've spoken with have been against AI. Same with the professors. It's pretty odd that on a campus where everyone is outspoken about AI, we still find posters that are obviously made with it.”
Bartlett said most of what he’s seen advertises off-campus shows rather than student work, but the issue bothers him regardless.
“AI just piggybacks off actual human work that's already been put on the internet. Essentially, it steals,” he said.
“Historically, art has been a human trait for millions of years. It doesn’t just affect art; it affects our own critical thinking.”
His alternative: pay a student artist instead.
“You could commission a student. It's not hard to design a poster … $20, or free entry to a show,” he said. “It could draw more attention to them as an artist.”
Ivory Gadsden, co-chair of STU Sustainability for the 2026-27 school year, said she has heard concerns from students.
“Especially since it’s such a liberal arts university, you should not be using AI posters,” Gadsden said.
She said the issue is environmental as much as creative.
She pointed to the amount of clean water used to power AI image generation and to what’s known as environmental racism — the pattern of polluting infrastructure, including the data centres that run AI tools, being placed disproportionately near marginalized communities.
“STU teaches about environmental racism, and then still has AI posters on campus that go against what the university stands for,” she said.
“It feels like they're going backwards instead of moving forward.”
Her ask for STU administration: treat AI-generated content as grounds to reject a poster submission.
“Posters need to be approved before going up. If administrators see one [that] uses AI, they should say, ‘Sorry, you need to make this yourself,’” Gadsden said.
“There should be a checklist of what’s allowed and somebody to enforce it.”
Bartlett said the stakes go beyond convenience.
“It’s advertised as a tool, but it's being used to rob people of jobs and creative freedom,” he said.
“Real human art has flaws, but the flaws are what make it nice. I feel like that gives it a lot more personality than the slop that's generated over and over by AI.”
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