Earlier this week, a group of girls logged into our virtual art room on Google Meet, settling in for what at first felt like a familiar creative session. The screen filled with bright, expectant faces, and at the center of it all was Samantha Bell — our longtime art instructor and a beloved guide through many Be the Voice of Girls adventures in creativity.
But this session was anything but typical.
It began, charmingly enough, with a window into Samantha’s own family life — a celebration of her daughter’s upcoming wedding. She shared stories and photos from the bridal showers, filled with flowers, laughter, and the sweet traditions that surround such moments in American culture. As she spoke about her daughters and the love that shaped these gatherings, the group listened with warmth and curiosity, asking questions and making connections across borders. And then, as naturally as a story turns a page, we shifted from memories to imagination, diving into the world of digital art and artificial intelligence.
Samantha introduced the girls to Red Panda AI, a free platform that allows users to generate images by typing descriptive phrases into a text box. This was a lesson not in drawing, but in prompting — a concept most of the girls had never encountered before. “A mouse reading a book under a tree at sunset,” Samantha typed into the generator, narrating as the screen transformed her words into a cozy, painterly image. “Let’s add glasses. Let’s change the tree. Let’s see what happens if we put him on an island.”
The mouse became a story. The story became a lesson in specificity. The lesson became a doorway into something deeper.
“AI can’t replace your imagination,” Samantha told the group. “But it can help you see what’s in your head a little more clearly.”
The girls were then split into groups, each challenged to create a dragon in a forest. That was the only rule. What emerged from their digital brushes was a parade of personality and perspective:
A pink dragon chasing a blue butterfly at sunset.
A black, fire-breathing monster tearing through trees.
A gentle creature surrounded by stars and sea foam.
One student even drew inspiration from Game of Thrones, prompting an AI-rendered beast that could’ve flown straight from the screen.
As they presented their work, some giggled over unexpected results—like penguins meant to depict global warming, inexplicably paired with a banana, or dragons that seemed to morph into mushrooms. Others spoke with surprising vulnerability about the challenge of trusting AI to translate their ideas, especially for those more comfortable with traditional drawing.
Samantha encouraged every response, validating the doubts as much as the successes. “Even if it’s not exactly what you imagined,” she reminded them, “it can give you a new place to begin. That’s what good reference material does — it supports, not supplants.”
For many of the girls, this was their first encounter with AI as a creative tool. They discovered, perhaps without realizing it, how digital literacy and artistic expression can intersect in empowering ways. They learned how to break down their thoughts into visual language — how to tell a machine what they see in their mind’s eye.
And maybe most importantly, they discovered something BVG has been teaching since the beginning: that their voices have shape, color, and story — and the tools are out there to help them share it.
As the session wrapped up, one participant wrote in the chat, “Using ai was very stressful for me [compare to] drawing on the paper… I struggled while trying to get the image i wanted”
Another said simply, “I’m going to keep trying. I want to see what else I can make.”
They will. And we will be here to see it.
