I Turned My Preschooler’s Drawing Into an Artist-Quality Illustration with DALL-E

Here’s exactly how to do it

Photos by the author, his son, and DALL-E

Imagine if you could take your child’s scribbles and transform their ideas into artist-quality illustrations. With generative AI, that’s now not only possible — it’s easy and cheap.

Earlier this month, OpenAI released two new features in ChatGPT. ChatGPT Vision allows the popular AI system to analyze the content of an image, and DALL-E3 allows is to create wholly new images all by itself.

I’ve been using these systems for lots of complex work stuff, like analyzing charts in government reports and extracting prices from restaurant menus.

But I’ve also been using it with my kids. And I recently found an incredibly cool way to combine these two new tools together.

My three-year-old son recently took a marker and scribbled out a little drawing, as three-year-olds do.

Like many preschoolers, his imagination went far beyond what his fine motor skills can manage. When I asked about his drawing, he explained that it was “a little triangle car with a smiley face and a rainbow.”