I'm a sophomore in high school who is highly concerned with the amount of AI usage in our schools. Our schools are constantly preaching the importance of not using artificial intelligence for our work, but are blatantly hypocritical to turn around and use it for everything they do. As an example, all of our Instagram and Facebook posts as of late have been created with the use of AI, including ones promoting our sports and clubs. Many of which have no desire to be associated with AI in the slightest. Multiple students have expressed their concern with this to no avail. We have been ignored over and over again, so I decided to bring it to a bigger source.

Our schools are continuing to prioritize AI usage for themselves, disregarding the concerns that many brave students have brought to them. Multiple, including me, have even offered up our limited free time to design posts for our schools to use. Then, instead of promoting AI, it would be promoting our talented students and the skills they have learned here. This is teaching the students that it is okay to be fully dependent on technology and to not express ourselves through creative ideas and instead let a computer do everything for us. It is also teaching that it is okay to not follow through with what we say and to be hypocritical towards ourselves and others. We are slowly creating a culture of dependency more than innovation for our younger generations. 

The worst part of this all is the fact that continuous AI usage is draining our water and hurting our environment more each and every time it is used. Roughly 0.5 - 1.0 milliliters of water is used up with every question or prompt that is given to AI. It may not seem like much, but think of it this way.  You want an image generated for you by AI. You put in a brief explanation of what you want generated. It creates it. On the lower end of the spectrum, 0.5 ML of water was just used on that prompt. But the image isn't exactly how you want it to be. So you add something else and you have the Artificial Intelligence redo the image. That's another 0.5 ML of water. A total of 1.0 ML of water.  You repeat this process 3-4 times until you find something that you deem as acceptable or even "perfect."  Yet every time you do this, you use up another 0.5 ML of our world's water supply. Meaning, on the lower end of the possibilities, roughly 2-3 ML of water is used per image generated, not even touching on the topic of the chatbots. This may not seem like a lot, but multiply this by 122 million, the amount of people that use generative AI DAILY. Our 2-3 ML quickly turns into 244-366 million ML of water just from AI. And that is if everyone only created one thing throughout the day. Many people create dozens of images and texts using AI on the daily, draining more and more of our water supply.

 In this past week alone, my school district has generated around 15 images created by artificial intelligence, wasting approximately 30-45 ML of water just this week. This may not seem like a big deal, but we are not the only school that does this. It is alarming to see how many schools are relying on artificial intelligence to be creative for them so that our instructors don't have to do much in order to keep our county up to date. They could easily gather a team of incredibly talented young digital artists to create their posts for them, yet they choose the even easier approach. We need to take a stand and make a change.

By prohibiting our schools AI usage, we can make a major impact on our resources currently. It will also teach our younger generations to take a stand and not let technology control creativity. We can adopt sustainable practices that will promote our academic growth instead of being forced to hyper fixate on if what is being taught is true. Let's lead by example and prevent our schools from roping its' students into a reputation they do not want to uphold. Many students feel strongly about our economical and artificial intelligence issues and will not stop until something is done to fix it.

To further prove our reliance on AI, this was my first time using this website and so far it has not left a fantastic impression. Drafting this petition, it tried to get me to post something entirely artificially created. I made it a point to change every word into something purely human written. The words you are reading are words written by a real student who has been inspired to make a change in our world. We are in a literacy and creativity crisis, along with being in a quickly failing environment. I urge you, let's take this small step to change. In creating a better learning environment for our upcoming generations and to give them a world with creativity, laughter, and most importantly, water. If you made it this far, please. Help me advocate for authentic ingenuity and conservation. We can create a future that values our potential as humans, one step at a time.