Was dead set against AI art until my kid's school project changed my mind

I used to think AI image generators were just for stealing from real artists and making weird memes. Then my 9 year old came home with a school project about local habitats and needed pictures of a specific type of marsh plant that grows near our creek in Ohio. We spent 30 minutes on Google and found nothing useful. I half jokingly typed it into DALL-E just to see what happened and it gave us something close enough to use for her diorama. That one win made me realize it has legit use cases for stuff like educational visuals where no real photo exists. Has anyone else found a practical reason to use these tools that changed your mind about them?

2 comments

2 Comments

patking25d ago

I read an article in Smithsonian magazine a few months back about how scientists are using AI to reconstruct images of extinct species and lost habitats for educational use. They had a whole piece about how there are no real photos of certain dodo bird habitats so researchers feed descriptions into these tools. Sounds like your kid's project is the same kind of thing just on a smaller scale. It's actually pretty wild how something that gets so much hate online can be genuinely useful for stuff like that marsh plant situation. People get so hung up on the controversy they forget tools can serve multiple purposes.

fiona33025d ago

Next thing you know they'll be using AI to tell us what ancient farts smelled like. Heaven help us when the dodo birds get airbrushed and Photoshopped back into existence.