A 6-year-old imagined her future self. Then her school gave her an AI version.

On a Friday evening in October, Nikki Anderson stood in the kitchen of her South Carolina home with her husband and their 6-year-old daughter, Harper, as they sifted through a folder of school assignments that had come home in the first-grader’s backpack. Harper and her classmates had recently completed a project that involved choosing a future career, and Anderson was admiring artwork that Harper had created with construction paper — a portrait of herself as a nurse.