Lily PolenchukOn July 20, graduate and post-doctoral students at the University of Alberta received an email that many found deeply troubling regarding artificial intelligence (AI). The Office of Graduate and Postgraduate Studies (GPS), in partnership with the U of A Library, announced the 2026 edition of the Images of Research (IOR) Competition and Exhibition. The novelty this year was a controversial new category: two awards with $1,000 in total winnings for AI-generated images.
Since its creation in 2015, IOR has been a valued platform that invites graduate students to create a visual piece that communicates the “essence of their research in one image, diagram, or drawing.” It celebrates academic creativity, sharpens academic communication skills, and makes specialized work accessible to the broader public. In doing so, it serves an important public function: showing the community the research and innovation work happening behind the university’s walls. The decision to award AI-generated images threatens to tarnish that legacy. IOR has allowed the use of AI art since 2023 and, in 2024, updated its guidelines to “formally include transparent documentation of AI tool integration during image creation.” This year is still the first time IOR has dedicated an award for AI image submissions.
Among many graduate and post-doctoral students, the announcement sparked resentment and disappointment. This outrage is not unique to the graduate community of the U of A; it reflects a debate happening worldwide. The use of AI image generators has ignited opposition across the internet, for good reasons.
The most immediate concern is copyright and authorship infringement of creative works. AI models were “trained” by scraping billions of visual content from the web. This includes professional art, personal photography, and private social media content, often without the creators’ knowledge or consent. This material, much of it protected by copyright, was then fed into algorithms. Investors and tech CEOs have openly declared that AI image generators could not have been developed without this systematic infringement of copyright regulations. AI companies then treated the image-production models as proprietary assets to themselves. In short, AI monetizes visual images on a foundation of uncompensated and uncredited creative labour. Moreover, the convenience that makes AI appealing — generating an image in seconds from a text prompt — has led users to bypass creative professionals altogether, ironically displacing the very artists whose stolen work trained the algorithms.
The ethical problems do not end with data theft and the economic displacement of visual artists’ work. AI-generated images have been used to spread misinformation, produce nonconsensual explicit content, and generate problematic content with a lack of social and cultural awareness (which often results in biased racial and gender stereotypes). The environmental cost is another crucial factor of concern: training and running these models consume vast amounts of critical natural resources, often sourced from territories already bearing the brunt of climate change.
As a public institution of higher education, the U of A should not be incentivizing the use of tools mired in such controversy. By offering money prizes for AI-generated submissions, GPS is actively encouraging and rewarding unethical practices. It is directing student attention away from genuine creative development and toward a technology that profits private corporations while undermining real artistry. I join my fellow graduate students in urging GPS and the U of A Library to revoke the IOR award for AI-generated submissions. A truly ethical university should encourage students to explore their human (non-artificial) creativity, to improve their technical skills in the arts, and to take authorship for the content they produce.
IOR has been about celebrating human imagination. It has spent a decade building trust and credibility among students, faculty, and the general public. The award for AI-generated images has irremediably damaged this reputation. In August, the adjudication committee deliberated and awarded two submissions likely created by a billionaire-owned algorithm trained with unwarranted data skimming. We now have to live in a world in which a high-education federal institution has granted a significant money prize for the use of Big Tech’s reprehensible new toy. A public display at the Education and Research Archive will show the winning pieces for students to decide whether this is the right or wrong decision. But, regardless, the university is now marking this year as the time when they encouraged students to make “art” with AI.
