Nikki Anderson opened her daughter Harper’s Friday folder and found something she wasn’t expecting.
Among spelling tests and first-grade art projects was a photo of the girl at age 25, dressed as a nurse and holding a clipboard, generated with artificial intelligence.
Harper is 6 years old, attends a public school in Charleston, South Carolina, and told her mother that her “specials” teacher had created the image. She also said she loved the wavy hair she would have as an adult.
In class, the girl had written that she wanted to be a nurse when she grew up and had drawn that future on construction paper. The school took a photo of her and generated an image of her as a nurse using an AI program.
Nikki, 32, says she signed a consent form at the beginning of the school year allowing her daughter’s photos and schoolwork to be used in media, but the document didn’t mention AI.
Now she wants to know what software was used, whether the photos were stored, and whether they were used to train models. She posted about it on Instagram, and the post received more than 600,000 likes.
“I don’t think children are the ones who need help imagining a future”, she wrote. The school has not made a public response, according to the media outlets that covered the case.
A girl drew her future with her own hands, and the school gave her an AI-generated version. Who decided that was necessary? 🤖