Recently, Pope High School began promoting a large event being held for the school's 40th anniversary, and the person(s) who have made the flyers for the event used Generative AI to fabricate them. It has also been used in other promotional material for the event such as T-shirts. The Cobb Virtual Academy also uses AI to generate instructional material and assignments for multiple online classes. There are also cases where teachers will use it for their instruction and assignments such as readings that the students take notes on and quiz / test remediation.

The problem with using AI to make the event promotions is that Pope has a Graphics Design class, with a plethora of students who would be willing to make flyers, T-shirt designs and other items relating to it at no extra cost to the school. These AI-Generated flyers have also been placed on signs all over campus, stuck to walls in the school and been presented during class meetings in the auditorium. The designs AI creates with the prompts given to it are often profoundly similar, being easily recognizable by specific fonts, consistent and repeated layouts, and oversaturated detail. These elements can easily be seen in the posts being made on the Pope High School Instagram account as well, where they post even more promotional content for the event. The use of AI for this could easily change the way many students feel about their school leadership, as a large portion of the student body actively opposes AI usage in general. This event also has an Artisan Market, where numerous vendors selling handmade items, artwork, jewelry and many other creative products will be. The use of AI all around the occasion is harmful and disrespectful to the hard work done by the artisans and small businesses, as AI uses no creativity and only surfs the internet for already existing work mostly done by real people. The general effect of these posters, flyers and more is empty and soulless because they look plain and repetitive. People that recognize the use of AI immediately know it wasn't a real person who made it, and that can easily make them feel uninterested and unwilling to support what the generated content may be promoting.

The issue with AI being used in lesson plans, online material and assignments is that teachers have been creating all of it without generative AI for decades, and now it is unnecessarily being used to do a task that isn't incredibly difficult for most. This contributes to the ongoing issue regarding water quality around AI data centers, and the volume of water that they consume as well (See the Morgan County Data Center water quality issue addressed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on May 20, 2026). On many occasions, Generative AI will get information wrong. Using it to generate parts of curriculum could easily mean biased, incorrect or misleading information is taught to students, which should not be the case in a public school system.

Signing this petition means you are looking for a restriction on administrators and teachers in the Cobb County School District from using Generative AI to promote school events, promote products, create lesson plans and other curriculum material.