my son is Disgusting. At least that’s what my 12-year-old daughter thinks, who on the one hand desperately wants her 7-year-old brother to be her playmate, but on the other hand finds many things about him disgusting, wrong, and inconsistent with her. and needs. This is understandable. The age gap is quite big – a middle school student who loves FNAF tries to bring a dog man—an obsessed second-grader enters the complex and anxious world of her teenage imagination.
Instead, they sat on the couch, laughing together like old friends with little difference in age. Peacemaker: Samsung’s new artificial intelligence app “Sketch to Image”. All in all, this is a very simple app that you can use to start a new sketch on your tablet or phone (available on many phones, tablets, and computers, including the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6, Z Fold 6, and Samsung Galaxy Tab ) S10+, which we used), performs line drawing and generates images using one of five presets – Illustration, Watercolor, Pop Art, Sketch or 3D Cartoon. And just like that, artificial intelligence waved its magic wand… and the results were actually pretty impressive.
Yes, my kids had their first try at creating elaborate toilets and poop demons – but they quickly outgrew such good laughs and drew lots of weird animals, some creepy faces, wild Wallpaper doodles, and a giggle or two of “self-portraits” containing them. They started creating characters and telling their stories – although I didn’t catch the clue. To be honest, I couldn’t keep up with the stream of creative output.
Later they painted it again and again and picked it back up the next day. Neither of them had any idea how “artificial intelligence” worked. These terms will not impress them. They are just here for results.
Sketch to Image is part of Samsung’s new suite of AI products, and I think it provides the most realistic, pragmatic look at actually useful AI capabilities. Take Note Assist transcribes recordings and organizes them into notes, complete with summaries. It actually works! Or Circle Search, which allows you to circle anything on any screen and…voila! You’ll get Google search results. Start using it and you won’t want to be without it. The problem with these is that they require complex computational tasks, but are easy for any of us to use. Of course, Sketch to Image is the simplest of them all—easy enough for a 7-year-old using a tablet and smart pen, but fun enough to carry you into adulthood.
Of course, many of us believe that any form of artificial intelligence currently available is inappropriate for children. I mostly don’t do that.
I am skeptical about introducing any type of generative AI tools to my children. Of course, I don’t want them to cheat on their homework, but more importantly, I don’t want them to think they are less creative than a computer. A lot of generative AI doesn’t improvise on your skills, but just creates something out of nothing. Just give it a prompt and it’ll spit out something without you having to do anything. Ask ChatGPT to “write a bedtime story about a silly zebra” and it will do just that (I got an incredibly boring result about a “Ziggy” zebra disguised as a giraffe) – but You, as a parent, don’t do that.
Samsung’s Sketch to Image feature is available on Samsung Galaxy S24F, S23F, S22F, S24 FE, S23 FE, Z Fold/Flip 6, Z Fold/Flip 5, Z Fold/Flip 4, Tab S10 series, Tab S9 series and Tab S8 series.
There are many options when it comes to generating plots, and you can ask it to do all the work for you. If you type “Pikachu and martini jumping on a donkey,” such an app will produce Pikachu and martini jumping on a donkey, copyright and appropriateness be damned. As my daughter likes to say, this is “brain rot.”
Happily, Samsung’s Sketch to Image has plenty of guardrails. First, it only repeats the picture you drew, with no text-to-image prompts. Second, it clearly labels each image as AI in the lower left corner. The most important thing is that it doesn’t allow you to draw a lot of inappropriate things. I wasn’t able to get a full list of guardrails from Samsung, but I can confirm that you can’t have the image speak dirty words, you can’t draw poop, nudity, certain body parts, no smoking or drinking, or appear to be copyrighted characters.
In other words, Sketch to Image feels like a really fun feature, but it’s limited in all the ways parents want it to be. No Pandora’s box of artificial intelligence here—just a fun and easy-to-use sketching app to help you get dinner together. Even one of this kid’s table manners is, well, pretty gross.
Tiger Trimble He is the father of two children, the current editor-in-chief of “Inverse”, and the former EIC of “Fatherly”. He’s tech-savvy but would rather skip screen time and go hiking with his family.
