My niece asked AI to draw our dog Ollie and now I owe her an apology

Last Saturday my 11 year old niece typed a few words about my golden retriever Ollie into some free AI image app, and what came out looked like a melted golden blob with six toes on one paw. She laughed, I laughed, and then I felt kind of bad because she spent 20 minutes tweaking the words and it never got better than a decent cartoon. Here is my hang up though: a photo of Ollie that I shot on my phone took me two seconds and looks way more like him, but some folks in this community would call the AI blob art and my photo just a snapshot. So which side wins here, does the AI version count as art because she wrote the words, or does it only count if a person actually made the thing with their hands? Curious where people land on this one because I honestly do not know anymore.

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jackson.sarah20d ago

My kid did the same thing with our cat, typed in "fluffy orange cat on a couch" about 30 times and every single one had weird eyes and extra legs. Here's the thing I told him, the AI did the drawing, he just gave it a prompt. That's more like ordering food at a restaurant than cooking the meal. The words matter some, sure, but the app did all the actual work of making the picture. Your phone photo of Ollie took two seconds but YOU framed it, YOU caught him at the right moment, and it actually looks like him. That's the real thing. The blob is a fun game to play with your niece, not art she made.

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