Last year, I helped my son with a Filipino group project. I mostly acted as his adviser because he isn’t very fluent in Filipino, and unfortunately, the group leader turned out to be… let’s just say not very helpful.

One thing I can’t stand is a lazy leader who takes credit for everyone else’s work. I know people like that will always exist, but I also knew her lack of effort could end up hurting my son’s grade. So I encouraged him to be proactive instead of waiting for everyone else.

Their task was to present Ibong Adarna as either a play, comics, or visual storytelling. The group chose comics.

Guess who ended up doing most of the work?

My son wrote the script (which, considering Filipino isn’t his strongest language, turned out pretty well), and he used AI to create the comic illustrations. Everyone approved the draft right away because, frankly, they barely contributed. If my son hadn’t constantly pushed them to participate, he would’ve completed the entire project by himself.

Even on presentation day, it was a mess. Some group members were late, while others had no idea what they were supposed to do. Watching him carry the project was frustrating, but thankfully, they managed to pull it off at the 11^th hour.

Later, I watched the recordings of all the presentations. Every group did a decent job.

When the grades came out, every group received a perfect score, except my son’s.

The teacher deducted points because the comic illustrations were AI-generated. But the question is:

What Counts as “Original Work” in the Age of AI?

It’s not like generating the comic was as simple as pressing a button. It still took my son a lot of trial and error, fine-tuning, and carefully refining the prompts to get the images he needed. The script wasn’t AI-generated, so every panel had to match the story he had already written. In many ways, it felt like illustrating a comic, you still have to plan the layout, sequence the scenes, and fit the dialogue into tiny speech bubbles without making everything look cluttered. AI helped create the artwork, but it didn’t assemble the comic for him.

Fine. I can accept that. Maybe she has a strict policy against AI, and that’s her prerogative.

What bothered me was that the other groups still received perfect scores even though they had obviously copied images straight from Google. I know this because my son initially considered doing the same thing. We decided against it because random images from Google don’t tell a story, they’re just static pictures you copy and paste. They don’t show actions or continuity, which is exactly what a comic needs.

So I’m left wondering: why is using AI to create original comic panels considered worse than simply grabbing copyrighted images from a Google search? If you type “Ibong Adarna” into Google, those exact images are among the first ones that appear.

My son didn’t want me to contest the grade because he was satisfied with what he received. He still graduated With Honors, and I’m proud of him regardless. Still, if that performance task had earned a perfect score like everyone did, he might have qualified for a higher ranking.

At the end of the day, I know it’s just a grade. It’s not life-changing.

I just found it a little frustrating that the copy-and-paste projects received perfect marks while the project that actually took significantly more effort was penalized.

Maybe that’s just the Reese Witherspoon in me from the movie Election coming out.

And yes… I know I’m probably a bit of a helicopter parent. I should change.