AI flyers without the slop

For pastors, church staff, and the volunteers who make the notices. A one-page checklist for AI-made flyers and social graphics — what to check before anything goes out. Reading time: about 5 minutes.

AI flyers are now normal in parishes — and the slop is showing. That is the honest picture in an OSV News report this week (National Catholic Reporter, 5 November): Catholic parishes are increasingly using AI to make flyers for festivals and gatherings, and the results are often easy to spot — garbled text, fake-looking photos, and copy that sounds earnest but says nothing.

One parish volunteer, Mim Scholle from Northern Virginia, put her finger on why it matters. She was reading an advert for a parish women's group when she looked closely at the photo: where one woman's hands should have been folded in her lap, the image showed a cluster of hands piled on top of each other. “It was very unsettling,” she said. “As a Catholic community, we're drawn to truth, beauty and goodness.”

She is right, and the point travels well beyond Catholic parishes. A flyer is often the first thing a neighbour sees of your church. If it looks careless, people reasonably wonder whether the event will be careless too. Connor McLaughlin, who works at the Catholic tech company Truthly after years in parishes, says it plainly in the same report: “The danger is the second someone recognizes that it's an AI, they assume that the parish doesn't care enough to take the time to promote something [well]. [And that] the thing that they're promoting is likely going to be of low quality as well.”

The answer is not to ban AI from the noticeboard. Used well, it can help an overworked volunteer enormously — McLaughlin himself praises one children's All Saints' Day festival flyer that used AI to draw saints in the style of Fisher-Price Little People toys: a creative choice that fitted the event and would attract families. The answer is a human in the loop, and a short checklist before anything goes out.

The one-page checklist

1. Start with a real design, not a generated picture

Open Canva (free) and start from a template, or from a real photo of your church, your people, or your last event. AI image generation is the weakest link in a flyer: it invents hands, misspells words, and produces the busy, generic look people now recognise instantly. If you do generate an image, treat it as a background or illustration — never as a depiction of a real person, and never of a child.

2. Never let AI write the details

AI is confident about dates, times, venues, and Bible references — and confidently wrong often enough to embarrass you. Type the what, when, where, and who yourself, then read them back off the finished flyer. One wrong date undoes a whole print run.

3. Check the picture like a person will

Zoom in. Count the hands and fingers. Read every word in the image itself, not just the caption you typed — AI-generated text inside images is where the garbling hides. Check faces, hands, crosses, candles, and anything theological: does this image say something your church does not believe? If anything looks off, replace it with a real photo. A genuine photo of your own congregation beats a polished fake every time.

4. Keep it simple, in your church's voice

The most common complaint in the report is not a technical error but a tone one: posters that are too busy, too generic, full of overly earnest copy. One clear headline, one date, one call to action. If the flyer could belong to any church anywhere, rewrite it until it could only belong to yours.

5. Say so when AI helped

The Diocese of Little Rock, Arkansas, has drawn up diocesan-wide AI guidelines, and disclosure is at their heart: in all cases where AI is used to create public content, its use must be disclosed to readers. “It goes to the matter of truthfulness,” says Deacon Matthew Glover, the diocese's chancellor, who oversaw the guidelines — an AI image of a priest doing something he never did, passed around without that context, can create confusion or even scandal. A small line — “Designed with AI assistance” — costs nothing and buys trust. It is the same rule Ekklisia's Responsible AI guide already states: do not present an AI-generated image or story as if it were real.

6. Respect the people in the picture

Little Rock's guidelines also draw two hard lines worth adopting anywhere: never create or alter an image depicting a real person without their permission, and photos of minors or vulnerable adults can never be changed. Get consent before using photos of real people — especially children — in anything public. That is already the watch-out on Ekklisia's Canva directory entry, and it applies double when AI is doing the editing.

Fifteen minutes, done properly

Texas writer Alden McRae makes the case best, in an Instagram reel called “Remaking AI Slop Church Posters”: she redesigns a church social flyer in Canva to show how simple it is to avoid AI altogether — and how much more beautiful a flyer looks with the tiniest bit of human effort. Her challenge is worth taking up: “If you have the choice between spending 15 minutes working to generate an AI image for the front of your bulletin versus 15 minutes combing through public domain artwork — just perusing museum websites — I hope that they would see that this is a chance for them to express themselves creatively, worship the Lord, evangelize to their community.”

Fifteen minutes is the right budget. Spend it on the human parts — the real photo, the true details, the words only your church would write — and let AI do the donkey work: resizing one design for print and social, drafting a first version of the caption, tidying a layout. That is the division of labour that works. Pope Leo XIV, who has urged Catholics to think critically about AI-made art, put the principle behind it in an October post: “It is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce… Algorithms lack the spark of humanity.”

A flyer made with love is, as Scholle says, time set aside to think of other people. AI can help you make it faster. Only a person can make it true.