Sam Altman Leverages AI For New Fatherhood Challenges

The age old question of why a baby cries has puzzled humanity for centuries.

AI Joins the Parenting Journey Sam Altmans Experience

Sam Altman the CEO of OpenAI and a new father to a 3 month old recently shared on OpenAIs new podcast how artificial intelligence is influencing his approach to fatherhood. Altman who describes himself as extremely kid pilled stated he was constantly using ChatGPT to ask questions about the behavior of babies during the first few weeks of his sons life. Now that he is a bit more settled he is using ChatGPT to ask more general questions about childrens developmental stages.

Altman said that clearly people have been able to take care of babies without ChatGPT for a long time. He added that he does not know how he would have done that.

This practice is obviously not fundamentally different from frantically Googling questions about babies something that even the most well prepared parents have been doing for decades. But given who Altman is his choice of internet tool to use is no surprise.

Navigating AI Advice Reliability and Risks

Still when hallucination remains a challenge for AI products it may be concerning to imagine relying so heavily on a chat AI for baby care answers.

But parents have been known to turn to many a questionable source for information in the middle of the night. Colleagues with children describe the bottomless pit of Google and the minefield of parenting Facebook groups. The question arises whether ChatGPT is really much different than taking the advice of someone online who is insisting that you are a neglectful caretaker if you are not basing your babys bed time on the current phase of the moon.

Perhaps the idea of parents using AI in search for child raising answers is less of a primal alarm bell than the idea of very young children using it which Altman also discussed.

AI Natives The Next Generation

Altman said there is this video that always has stuck with him of a baby or a little toddler with one of those old glossy magazines tapping the cover. The child thought that the magazine was an iPad. He noted that kids born now will just think that the world always had extremely smart AI.

Former OpenAI science communicator Andrew Mayne who was interviewing Altman recalled seeing a social media post from a parent who used the voice mode of ChatGPT to talk to his child about his obsessions.

Mayne said gleefully that the parent got tired of talking to his kid about Thomas the Tank Engine so he put ChatGPT into voice mode. An hour later the kid was still talking about Thomas the train.

Altman interjected that kids love voice mode.

As todays parents turn to ChatGPT for all sorts of similar uses this will likely end up reflecting the same repetitive discourse around the iPad kid generation. Yes it is probably bad to let your kid watch hours and hours of Cocomelon no it is not fair to expect parents to occupy their kids time 24 7.

But existing childrens media is at least for now created by a team of humans while ChatGPTs own policies recommend it not be used by children under age 13. It does not have a vetted parental controls mode. Even Altman is aware of the risks he said.

Addressing the Challenges Ahead

Altman said that it is not all going to be good and there will be problems. He stated that people will develop these somewhat problematic or maybe very problematic parasocial relationships and society will have to figure out new guardrails.

Altman is correct. We do not fully know the effect of letting kids talk to a large language model about Thomas the Tank Engine for an hour. But at the end of the day Altman is the head of a massive company spending billions and billions of dollars with the hope of building AI that is smarter than humans and he never forgets that in his messaging.

Altman said the upsides will be tremendous. He also stated that society in general is good at figuring how to mitigate the downsides.