Parenting is hard. Why not let an AI model take over some of your childrearing duties? It may come at the expense of forming lasting emotional bonds with your progeny, but that’s a tradeoff that some AI adherents, evidently, have calculated to be worth it.
OpenAI Sam Altman has bragged about how much he relies on ChatGPT to raise his son, and also thinks it’s a good idea to let an AI-generated podcast replace the “so how’d your day go?” catchup talk a mom or dad has in the car when they pick their kid up from school.
Altman’s comments were ruthlessly — and rightfully — mocked at the time. But his robo-rearing ideas pale in comparison to this latest take from an AI bro.
In a now deleted post on X, Alvin Sng, a software engineer at the startup Factory AI, recalled a conversation he had with his wife when she asked him to read his newborn baby a book. As he explained, he had a better idea that required zero effort on his part.
“I can just play an audiobook from my phone,” he told her.
His spouse reasonably complained that an audiobook wouldn’t be in his voice. But Sng wasn’t to be outdone in the zero-effort-parenting department.
“I can train a voice model,” he countered, before addressing his readers: “Parenting hits different when you work in AI.”
Folks, what is the p(doom) of becoming estranged from your kid? A baby can’t understand what a father is reading it, but it can recognize his voice. There’s something perverse about some of a baby’s early and formative exposure to what its father sounds like being an AI approximation.
And already wanting to automate parenting duties this early on doesn’t bode well for the future. The precious time between a child and a parent doesn’t need to be streamlined, but the AI industry is obsessed with selling us on the idea of optimizing every part of our lives. Let an AI like Meta’s buzzy Muse agent send texts and emails on your behalf. Let an AI plan out your day or plan out your vacation. Let it handle bookings and reservations. Let it read for you and also let it be your friend, since human friends aren’t always available and sometimes disagree with you.
The response from netizens to Sng’s story was one of horror and disbelief.
“Shouldn’t your first instinct be to read your baby a book willingly as a father and to spend more time with your baby?” asked one user.
Another called it “one of the saddest things I’ve read on this app.”
Jess Calarco, a sociologist and author, called it “telling that men would rather try to invent tech to replace humans’ role in caregiving than step up as equal partners in parenting.”
Many parents, all the same, are embracing AI. Some placate their kids by letting them talk endlessly with ChatGPT voice mode. One mom even built an AI clone of herself so her son could talk to it while she traveled for work. Sensing demand, Meta is building an AI app called “StoryKit” that dreams up and reads personalized bedtime stories for children.
For Sng, AI was on the brain the moment his child came kicking and screaming into this world.
Before his controversial post, he uploaded a photo with his wife and baby at the hospital with an eyebrow raising caption. “After spawning so many agents,” he wrote, “it was about time to spawn a human.”
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