It Took AI To Bring My Kids Together — And I’m OK With That

My son is disgusting. At least that’s the opinion of my 12-year-old who, on one hand, wants dearly to turn her 7-year-old brother into a playmate, and on the other finds so much about him repulsive, wrong, at odds with her wants and needs. It’s understandable. The age gap is sizable — with a FNAF-loving middle schooler trying to bring a Dog Man-obsessed second-grader into her complex and anxious world of tween imaginings.

And yet, there they are, on the couch, drawing together and laughing like old buddies whose age difference is no big thing. The peacemaker: Samsung’s new AI-powered app, “Sketch to Image.” It’s a very simple app, all things told, in which you start a new sketch on a tablet or phone (available on a host of phones and tablets and computers including the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6, Z Fold 6, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10+, which we used), do a line drawing, and generate an image with one of five presets — Illustration, Watercolor, Pop Art, Sketch, or 3D cartoon. Like that, the AI waves its magic wand and … the results are actually pretty impressive.

Yes, my kids first attempted to create beautifully rendered toilets and poop demons — but they pushed past such good laughs rather quickly and drew many weird animals, a few creepy faces, wild wallpaper doodles, and a “self portrait” or two that had them cackling. They started to make characters and tell stories about them — though I didn’t catch the arc. I honestly couldn’t follow the flurry of creative output.

They drew and drew again later and picked it back up the next day. Neither of them has any clue how “AI” plays into this at all. Such terms don’t impress them. They’re only here for the results.

Sketch to Image is part of a suite of new AI offerings from Samsung that I think give the most real, pragmatic view of what actually useful AI features might look like. Take Note Assist, which transcribes recordings and organizes them into notes, complete with summaries. Actually useful! Or Circle to Search which allows you to circle anything on any screen and … voila! you get a Google Search result. Start using that, and you won’t want to live without it. The thing about these is that they require complex computational tasks, but are easy things for any of us to use. And Sketch to Image of course, is the easiest among them — easy enough for a 7 year old with a tablet and smart pen to use, but enjoyable enough to take you into adulthood.

Of course, there are plenty of us who don’t think AI in any shape or form right now is for kids. I mostly don’t.

I’m skeptical of introducing any sort of generative AI tool to my children. I do not want them to cheat on their homework, sure, but more importantly I don’t want them to think that they are less creative than a computer. A lot of Generative AI doesn’t riff on your skills, but just creates something out of nothing. Give it a prompt and it can spit out something that requires nothing from you. Ask ChatGPT to “write a bedtime story about a silly Zebra” and it will do just that (I got one incredibly boring result about “Ziggy” the zebra who pretended to be a giraffe) — but then you, the parent, doesn’t struggle with a ridiculous story and your kid doesn’t get to chime in and move it into new territory as they see that you have no way of landing the tale.

When it comes to generative drawings, well, there are plenty of options out there where you ask it to do all the work for you. If you type “Pikachu with a martini jumping on a donkey,” such an app will generate Pikachu with a martini jumping on a donkey, copyright and appropriateness be damned. As my daughter loves to say, that’s “brain rot.”

Happily, Samsung’s Sketch to Image has guardrails — a lot of them. For one, it will only riff on a drawing you make, no word-to-image prompts. Second, it clearly labels each image as AI — right there in the lower left hand corner. And most importantly it doesn’t allow you to draw a lot of inappropriate things. I couldn’t get a full list of guardrails from Samsung but I can verify you can’t make images say bad words, you can’t draw poop, naked bodies, certain body parts, no smoking or alcohol or, it seems, copyrighted characters.

In other words, Sketch to Image feels a lot like just a very fun feature that is restricted in all the ways parents would want. There’s no AI Pandora’s box here — just a fun easy-to-use sketch app that can get you through a dinner together. Even if one of the kid’s table manners are, well, rather disgusting.

Tyghe Trimble is a dad of two, the current Editor-In-Chief of Inverse and former EIC of Fatherly. He is tech-savvy, but would much rather skip screentime to be on a hike with the family any day.