Well it's not that surprising when you consider that the training data for your daughter's neural network is being generated by a network of the same architecture which has been optimized to do so. We are not just learning machines, we are teaching machines. The rough drawing of a lion is your distillation of the various visual features which you consider to be hallmarks of something being a lion. Your description of the difference between lions and tigers is a summary of the features you apply the most weight to when you try to distinguish them. Even data in the wild like pictures on the internet or books in the library are overwhelmingly generated by humans for humans. Computers on the other hand are fundamentally alone - they have no ancestors with similar minds to pass understanding down to them, and must figure out everything on their own. Really machine learning is a misnomer, what they are doing is far more analogous to discovery than learning.
