By: Sarah Struthers
At RRC Polytech, the academic guidelines for using AI are different in every department.
Graphic Design student, Carlyn Duncan, can immediately spot an AI poster in the wild.
“It’s lacking hierarchy, it’s lacking contrast, your focal point is missing,” said Duncan, 28, expressing the key elements of design she’s learned at RRC Polytech. “[AI posters] are just crappy in delivering that message.”
In her classes, there are conversations about how to use AI, how to work around it, and how to make sure that their work as graphic designers is still relevant.
“We’re not just creating something pretty,” said Duncan. “There’s a lot more actual skill and ideation and exploration of concept that goes into creating a design.”
Duncan has access to AI tools available in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, such as generative fill and expand, but she avoids using them.
“When you’re using generative AI, it is mining that from other artists, other creators, and I think that’s stealing. I don’t consider that to be an original concept.”
Despite the prevalence of AI posters, Duncan will continue to create her work by hand. “I value human creativity,” said Duncan. “And I know I’m not alone in that.”
In July 2025, RRC Polytech began developing an institutional AI strategy, led by Senior Strategic Advisor, Rebecca Molly Hiebert.
She says that transparency, reliability and validity are some of the safety principles that RRC Polytech developed when creating its AI strategy. Remaining human-centered and providing support to people adapting to AI are some of the institutional commitments.
This strategy is supported by an AI steering committee and five working groups, with one focus being on student experience.
Cybersecurity students, William Abbott and Gerald Dubois consider AI to be a helpful, yet harmful, tool.
“It’s very tempting,” said Abbott, 19, who is studying at RRC Polytech’s Exchange District Campus (EDC). “It’s always going to be easier to be like ‘hey, do this assignment for me’ instead of doing it yourself.”
Since the start of classes two weeks ago, Abbott has used Google Gemini’s generative AI Overview for help researching and simplifying unclear concepts on two assignments.
“AI can definitely suck,” said Abbott. “But it’s kind of inevitable that we have to learn to be mutual with it instead of being totally against it and not being able to use it.”
While Abbott sticks to the free AI models, Dubois pays $25 a month for the premium models of ChatGPT and Claude AI for research and analysis purposes.
“It’s cool. I like it,” said Dubois, 26. He says it’s worth it to pay for the deeper learning and processing, even if the accuracy of the results are not perfect.
“No matter how good your prompts are, you’re never going to get 100% accuracy,” said Dubois. “It does efficiently clean up a lot of my time and flow to have that.”
Game Development student, Claudia Rodriguez, translates her programming from Spanish to English. She uses AI to check her spelling and to make sure she’s using the right words.
Rodriguez moved from Mexico to Canada a year ago to study Game Programming at RRC Polytech.
“I do think that the industry has been using [AI] without thinking (about) the long term,” said Rodriguez. “This is not a replacement for people.”
In the video game industry, Rodriguez says that a lot of people use AI for quick concepts and for pitching ideas of what the game might look like to producers.
Rodriguez thinks AI can be helpful for working through concepts, but doesn’t want people to rely solely on AI for the final result.
