Sam Altman shares a ‘ChatGPT-inspired’ parenting tip that internet does not agree with, tells him to ‘do better’

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman ignited a viral debate over the weekend after suggesting parents use ChatGPT Work to generate daily personalized podcasts for their children’s morning drive to school. In a post detailing what he termed a “cool use case,” Altman proposed linking family calendars and children’s personal interests to the app, allowing the artificial intelligence to produce audio summaries covering upcoming soccer games, birthdays, and current events. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Sam Altman wrote, “cool use case of chatgpt work i heard last night: connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests. every morning for the drive to school, make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.”

Internet to Sam Altman: Parents can and should do better

Altman’s idea was met with widespread skepticism online, headlined by a viral reply from Alex Hirsch, creator of the animated series Gravity Falls. Hirsch offered a simple, low-tech rebuttal in his post: “What if you just talked to your children?”Hirsch’s single-sentence question quickly overshadowed Altman’s original post. While Altman’s comment gathered some 4,000 reposts and 12,600 likes, Hirsch’s reply exploded online. Hirsch’s response to Sam Altman has so far received over 18,000 reposts and 197,000 likes. This is not the first time that Altman has spoken about using ChatGPT for parenting. He has previously as well spoken about using ChatGPT at home. During an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon he said that he could not imagine navigating his newborn son at that stage without ChatGPT, though he conceded that parents managed without it for generations.“I cannot imagine having gone through, figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT,” Altman told Fallon during the interview on NBC. He added, “Clearly, people did it for a long time — no problem.” Altman said he feels “kind of bad” asking a technology that boasts such wide-knowledge questions like, “Why does my kid stop dropping pizza on the floor and laughing?”Another example, Altman said, was a couple of months ago when he was at a party talking to someone who was also raising a newborn. Altman reportedly recalled that the parents said that their six-month-old was “crawling everywhere.” Altman said he grew concerned that his son was not at the same stage. “I ran to the bathroom, and I was like, do I need to take my kid to the doctor tomorrow morning?” Altman said, describing what he typed into ChatGPT: “Is this okay?”Altman said OpenAI’s chatbot responded “with a great answer, which was of course,” his son’s development was “normal.”