I have a tradition with my daughter; every year I commission an illustrator to make a drawing of her; then I use it to share with the world my joy of her being alive for another year, on her birthday. Today, she asked me to print a compilation of all these illustrations, and we noticed a gap, for birthday #4
Back on 2021, we visited Disneyworld instead of having a birthday party, and for some reason I skipped that year (maybe I just forgot?). That year’s birthday theme was The Lion King (hence the journey to Disney Animal Kingdom, I guess).
I wondered what to do about that gap, gotta fill that somehow.
I thought, well, I can take a picture of her, delete the background, and apply some transforms in GIMP, and then some filters, to make it look close enough to a cartoon. Of course, I failed miserably.
So I thought… for a first time… let’s see how this AI thing does it? I decided to use ChatGPT (I know there are better options, I don’t care much), and I fed it with my half-assed effort to see what it could do with it.
Not gonna lie, the first one almost nailed it, but after 9 prompts and exhausting my daily free quota, I couldn’t get the colors right while keeping the original hair style.
Just as it was generating a second iteration, my daughter called me: she had taken the job on her own to fill the gap, and already had a rendition of it. She saw the need, got her pencil, and hit the notebook. She created something, out of her imagination.
That moment was depressing… if she knew she could instead prompt an AI generator to create an image that matched the style of the set… if she knew the generator’s output would probably be 100x “better” than whatever she could make with her limited drawing abilities… would she have gone ahead and take the pencil?
Will the humans in the future decide to create instead of remix and optimize?
She did ask me, however, if I knew someone (a human), that could take her vision and illustrate it on a style and quality similar to the rest.
For now, I’ll include hers as the official drawing for 2021.
Sidenote: I’ve always felt conflicted about FormulaProc… if I went ahead and used generative AI I could easily fill the rooster with 20 drivers, and even create some cool track maps in anime style. I guess people wouldn’t care either way.
Slashie's Gamedev Adventures 
I can not guess what AI will do to a child’s mind or their eagerness to be creative, but I do think her drawing does not need improvement or any other artist making it look like the rest of the illustrations, because it is PERFECT as is. Instead I’d encourage her to from now on do one each year and see her own style developing, and to keep drawing, always. 🙂