A new mascot blasts off for the LCC Stars—Stellar design or space-faring slop?

This article is part of The Lookout's LCC x AI series, a multi-part series on conversations surrounding AI and its impacts at Lansing Community College. 

By Karina Hartley
Staff Reporter

At the beginning of March, an image unveiling a new design concept for LCC’s athletics mascot was uploaded to the Student News section of LCC’s website, as well as on their social media. After this concept art’s debut, comments streamed in on Facebook and Instagram criticizing the design and its origin. Many commenters were disappointed and angry to learn that this new mascot concept, a blue and white astronaut sporting the LCC Stars logo, was created with the help of AI tools.

The college acknowledged this with a note that stated, “Initial concept development created utilizing various generative AI tools.” On LCC’s Student News post, this was written at the bottom of the page. On the social media accounts, this note was included on the image itself.

This incident struck a particular nerve with many individuals affiliated with the art department at LCC. Dozens of comments spoke to their frustration, mainly calling out that LCC has an expansive and talented art department, and they were befuddled at why the administration didn’t take advantage of those resources. While online responses were harsh, conversations with individuals on campus sparked a bit more nuance, revealing that not everyone in the art department shared this critical sentiment. 

Some individuals within the art department have felt that AI has served as a push towards accessibility and efficiency in the creative world, and are enthusiastic about this emerging quality of technology being integrated into their lives as artists at the college.

In a conversation with Laurie Bishop, an art professor at LCC, she describes the positive change that this mascot represents for her and the art department. “I love [the mascot]. I think he's perfect for our students because, you know, ‘Stars reaching for the stars.’ I'm a fan,” Bishop said. “The fact that they use AI to generate it, I think is fabulous,”

Her thoughts on the mascot align with her belief that the college and the art department ought to keep up with the changing technology and changing world, and that becoming familiar with AI will only serve to benefit artists. ”Time is money. And if we can create things in a shorter span of time with the use of AI, that helps us become more productive,” Bishop said. “It also helps everybody make a little more money at the end of the day, too.”

In Bishop’s classroom, AI prompting is something that occurs alongside brainstorming, drafting, sketching, and photoshopping—not something that replaces it. “I think it's really important that we stay open to the idea that creativity is always going to be born in the human,” she said. “AI isn't creative, it's only creative or can generate creative things when we, the creative people, are prompting it to do so.” While Bishop does not require her students to use AI, she sees it providing more accessible avenues for students to be successful in their art classes.

Cheyenne Bywater is a student who benefits from such strides toward accessibility, and she explained that she will sometimes use AI as a tool in her artistic process. Bywater says she doesn’t always feel confident that her art skills are sharp enough without using references. She will often source images or videos online to reference. If there’s something she can’t find, she’ll turn to ChatGPT or Gemini to help her generate references and ideas.

Bywater does, however, feel that there’s a limit to how much of an assignment should be touched by AI. “To completely use an AI thing to go towards a graded school project, obviously that would be a big no-no,” she said. “Because it's not technically your creation, but to use it to assist or maybe have some parts of a project be a little bit more AI generated than others and have kind of a mixture, I feel like that would be okay.” Bywater admired the new mascot design, despite its AI elements. “I thought it looked cute, but knowing that it does have AI components to it, I still like it. I still think it looks cool.”

Mascot origins

A comment on Instagram by LCC President Dr. Steve Robinson provided more insight as to how the mascot came to be and the role that AI played in its creation. He explained that AI was used only by him, and only in the earliest phases of the mascot’s development. “I used a few gen AI tools to explore the idea of a space explorer mascot,” Robinson’s comment reads. “Those were pretty crude exploratory images, and that’s not what you are seeing here.” He adds that the final mascot will be human-designed, and that the disclaimer on the image was his “idea and decision.”

In an interview with Dr. Robinson, he discussed the origins of the mascot concept. Robinson said the idea to create a new mascot came out of conversations with the athletics department. They discussed how LCC has been the Stars since 1976, but has never had a costume mascot like the college’s neighbor, Michigan State, does in their iconic Sparty. Robinson elaborated on the void they wished to fill: “We have a mascot as kind of an idea, but we have never had one that is a suit that a human being can put on and jump around at the side of an athletic event, or go to something.”

Robinson shared that he personally went through a rough sketching phase of this design, as well as a session playing around with AI tools. “I did a couple drawings and then my chief of staff, Layne Ingram, put together a comprehensive group of folks to kind of explore the idea,” Robinson said, alluding to the “Athletics Mascot group” he cited in the aforementioned Instagram comment. “I gave them some of my sketches, but I didn't get involved because I didn't want the president to be, you know, the person pushing it,” Robinson said.

After deliberating on a mascot that was “cool [and] that also tells the story of being a star,” the group passed the project off to artists in the marketing department. The image that is displayed online, Robinson explained, is a product of the creative efforts of LCC staff, who used tools like Photoshop. Robinson adds that the design has been sent to professional costume artists in New York, who will construct the mascot. “In terms of using generative AI, I'm the only person who did that,” Robinson asserted. “Everything about the actual costume… that's all human-powered design stuff.”

Student involvement

Some students in LCC’s art department feel that this mascot speaks to another level of the thinning out of opportunities for emerging artists at the college.

Austin Vue, art student and president of the LCC Art Club, spoke to how disappointing it was to be glossed over as creative department. “AI definitely has me worried as an art student. It is taking away our jobs and making us lose touch of human connections,” Vue said. “There are many times I wanted to ask someone for advice, and they tell me to just use AI.”

Vue was not impressed by the new mascot concept art: “It felt very lazy, sloppy, and a missed opportunity to have our fellow students involved.”

As LCC staff, Bishop does not see the necessity for involving the art department in the design. “We have to remember, too, that our marketing department has very competent people in it. And so their need to come to the art department for help like that is— I'm not sure that that's a need at this point,” commented Bishop.

Vue, however, believes that part of what makes students enthusiastic about a new mascot is the college engaging with them in the creative process. “Many schools that I’ve been following have students either design or vote on a mascot. It is a community effort, and that’s what I think LCC needs. All the students at the other schools love their mascot because of this creative process. It was made by people for people.”

Another student in the art department, Zabana Ives, felt strongly about the lack of involvement as well. “I feel like they could have done anything else,” she said. “Like, you have plenty of art students, art professors. You could have asked anyone to be like, hey, we want a new mascot like this.”

Though the design process did not involve students, the naming process did. “It was really important to the team and to me that we do as much student engagement as we could,” Robinson explained. Through a March Madness–style competition, students were able to vote on what the mascot will be named. The final two names have been narrowed down to Lance and Starry, with the winner set to be revealed on April 10.

Robinson is confident that students will continue to be involved with the creation of the mascot beyond choosing its name, as well. Citing some of the traditions around Sparty at Michigan State, Robinson said, “I think it'll be fun to see if those kinds of traditions develop. They kind of have to develop organically.”

Looking forward

As the meaning of the mascot develops with student interaction, so too does the impact of the use of AI on artists at the college. Andrew Elsten, an art professor at LCC, did not feel enthusiastic about this new mascot. “As a mascot design, it functions,” he said, “but like a lot of other AI-inspired stuff, is kind of lackluster, especially from just an anatomical perspective.”

Elsten thinks that the conversations around this new mascot point to a broader trend. He believes that the artist process—meandering and starting over, toiling and struggling through rough and unsatisfying drafts—is where the real growth lies. Elsten believes that AI is weakening this process and reducing the level of grit that you are meant to acquire in a college course: “People aren't able to engage in the same way with difficulty when they have critical thinking or quote-unquote “critical thinking tools” [AI] that do the generation and the ideation for them.”

Elsten sees the new wave of generative AI affecting the art department and his teaching less in the art itself, and more in a sweeping deterioration of capacity for critical thought across the student body. That the disservice that is being done to the students goes beyond just being overlooked on creative projects, but is diminishing students’ capacity to think. “What I'm seeing is a waning of that kind of gray matter. I'm seeing people thinking less and less through a process,” said Elsten.

It seems that this mascot could be ushering in a new era for art across LCC. How and why students engage with these new tools remains to be seen. However, as Vue articulates, engagement remains essential: “The point of being an art major is you have to understand what makes a good art piece. I just hope it stays that way because art is about collaboration with others. We are working with each other, not with a robot.”