By: Peyton Saunders | Staff Writer
On March 4, 2026, an email was sent to University of Lynchburg students advertising new apparel at the Hornet Shop. What caught the attention of students and faculty is that the images in the advertisement were created with artificial intelligence image generation.
AI Language Learning Models have become ingrained in campus culture at the University of Lynchburg, serving as an important tool for learning and training for future careers. LLMs have been embraced as the future of workplace efficiency, but for some, AI image generation remains a gray area.
Destin Tanner, the retail and licensing manager of the Hornet Shop, confirmed the use of AI and explained the decision: “The University of Lynchburg embraces AI as part of its culture, and the Hornet Shop is no different. It is one of the many tools we use, alongside Instagram, TikTok, photography, email, and text messaging, to engage customers and promote our store and merchandise.”
Tanner also emphasized that the advertisements were still created with human oversight and that the Hornet Shop is committed to using AI responsibly and transparently.
For some students, like Macy Roberts, a senior electronic media major, the use of AI isn’t so black-and-white.
“I think it just paints the school in a bad light that you wouldn’t reach out to your students to promote your designs and it shows a kind of lack of thoughtfulness and just concern about your students, and it’s just sort of disrespectful and disregards the students that are supposed to be wearing the merch and the people that you’re supposed to be promoting,” said Roberts.
Kadin Bankel, a junior English major, said, “I feel like it’s really not that hard to find a real person to wear your clothes, especially if you’re in a small college, but I mean, it’s also not shocking. I’m sure it’s probably cheaper for them to do that.”
The Hornet Shop is active on its Instagram and TikTok accounts, where it creates videos featuring staff to advertise new arrivals, ordering deadlines for graduation regalia, and sales, all without using AI.
“I’ve seen pictures of campus events and all that, and then I’ll see someone who’s in one of my classes, and you know, there is that connection,” explained Dr. Stephen Dawson, a professor of social sciences.
This connection aspect doesn’t even consider the environmental impact. The operation of AI depends on data centers, which require significant amounts of water and power to generate AI images and answer questions.
Dr. David Perault, a professor of environmental science at the university explains how individual queries add up, stating, “It doesn’t seem like much every little query every little ask, but you multiply that by millions and millions of the queries and it’s more energy consumption and that leads us back to the giant data centers, the cloud centers were all this stuff is stored and where things are analyzed, and this can have a big impact in terms of energy consumption, water consumption and land disruption from building those centers.”
Perault believes that individual actions like reducing personal usage of AI and even decisions like bringing cloth bags to the store instead of using plastic ones can make a difference in the environment, but he also discussed the difficulty of challenging AI usage, “How do we not only point it out but how do we help address it, and what can we do about it? It’s still early and then again, I don’t have a great answer for that.”
While students are typically able to quickly recognize AI images, professors were less certain.
“I went to an AI talk last week by another professor here and he put up side-by-side slides of AI generated text and human generated text and asked us to tell the difference, and I got it wrong every time,” said Perault.
The landscape of AI is changing every day, however, and the evolving technology can even trick young people who think they can always tell the difference.
People who want to express values of environmentalism or human creativity by not supporting AI image generation will increasingly need to depend on the company or individual that prompted the work, self-reporting their use of AI, instead of waiting to be asked or not answering when asked.