A mom was left unsettled after her six-year-old daughter came home from school with an AI-generated photo of her as an adult.
Nikki Anderson, 32, from South Carolina, took to Instagram this week to share her outrage over the incident, slamming the school for replacing her ‘child’s interpretation’ of her future with ‘an algorithm’s interpretation of what a successful adult woman should look like.’
Anderson explained in the lengthy post: ‘My daughter’s public school uploaded her face into AI to show her what she’d look like at age 25. She is six.’
The mom shared the AI-generated photo, which featured a smiling woman standing in a hospital dressed in scrubs. She had long, wavy hair, a perfect smile and clear skin.
She also included a snap of a picture her daughter, Harper, had made by cutting out shapes from construction paper of a nurse in a hospital.
‘[My daughter] wants to be a nurse,’ Anderson went on. ‘This is the one she made out of construction paper.
‘Every single thing about this was a decision she made. What does a nurse look like? What belongs in a hospital? How do I fit in there?
‘That’s childhood creativity, imagination and cognitive development.’
Nikki Anderson, 32, from South Carolina, was left unsettled after her six-year-old daughter came home from school with an AI-generated photo of her as an adult
Anderson pointed out that in the ‘AI version,’ her daughter is depicted as a ‘young, thin, conventionally attractive’ woman with ‘long hair and clear skin.’
‘My child’s interpretation of the world has been replaced with an algorithm’s interpretation of what a successful adult woman should look like,’ she continued.
‘She had already imagined the future and made something incredible to represent it. What part of that needed to be finished by a computer?
‘Why did we decide that the most valuable thing we could do with a six-year-old’s imagination was make it look like something else?’
The mom also stated that the school did not ‘get consent’ from her to use her daughter’s face ‘for AI image processing.’
‘Which company received the photographs?’ she wondered. ‘Were the images retained, logged, shared with sub processors or used for model improvement?
‘Does the school have a contract? Does it restrict how the vendor handles children’s data?
‘Where did her face go? Was this a closed, school-approved system? A third-party commercial platform? Were the photographs retained, used for model training or deleted afterwards?’
The mom (seen) took to Instagram this week to share her outrage over the incident, slamming the school for replacing her ‘child’s interpretation’ of her future with ‘an algorithm’s interpretation of what a successful adult woman should look like.
She ended the post by stating that she doesn’t want her daughter to see AI ‘as something magical’ before she got to properly teach her about it.
She added in the caption: ‘[My daughter] is a small human who is literally capable of imagining an entire independent future inside her own head. I cannot get over how cool that is.
‘Why do adults feel the need to insert a multibillion dollar industry into something children already do better than us? To what? Make it more impressive? More marketable? More worth looking at?
‘I don’t think the children are the ones who need help imagining a future.’
While speaking about it further to People, Anderson recalled feeling ‘grossed out’ and being ‘in disbelief’ when she first saw the image.
She said her daughter was completely enthralled by the AI-generated picture, explaining: ‘She said that she loved the picture because she had straight and wavy hair and that is what she always wanted, and she hopes she would be that beautiful when she grows up.
‘But she said that it was just a guess so there’s a chance that “I won’t look like that… I hope I do.”‘
She also included a snap of a picture her daughter, Harper, had made by cutting out shapes from construction paper of a nurse in a hospital, writing: ‘Every single thing about this was a decision she made’
She revealed that she reached out to the school’s administration to share her concerns but is still waiting on a response.
Anderson’s Instagram post went viral, and it sparked a debate about the use of AI.
‘The response has been much bigger than I anticipated. People have had some very strong opinions,’ she reflected.
‘Some parents were horrified by the privacy implications. Others thought I was overreacting to a harmless classroom activity.
‘I shared it because I thought other parents deserved to know this was happening, and I wanted to think about the implications of every single piece of this, and I think parents have contributed some other very valid points.
‘I understand why someone might initially think it’s cute. I don’t think anyone involved necessarily intended harm.’