{"id":195767,"date":"2025-06-19T00:32:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-19T00:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/195767\/"},"modified":"2025-06-19T00:32:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-19T00:32:09","slug":"kid-pilled-sam-altman-constantly-asked-chatgpt-questions-about-his-newborn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/195767\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Kid-pilled’ Sam Altman ‘constantly’ asked ChatGPT questions about his newborn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Across hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, an impossible question has befuddled our species: Why is the baby crying?!<\/p>\n

Sam Altman, who is both the father of a 3-month-old and CEO of OpenAI, hopped on OpenAI\u2019s new podcast<\/a> today to talk about how his company is impacting his experience with fatherhood. Altman, who describes himself as \u201cextremely kid-pilled,\u201d said he was \u201cconstantly\u201d using ChatGPT to ask questions about the behavior of babies during the first few weeks of his son\u2019s life \u2014 now that he\u2019s a bit more settled, he\u2019s using ChatGPT to ask more general questions about children\u2019s developmental stages.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, clearly, people have been able to take care of babies without ChatGPT for a long time,\u201d Altman said. \u201cI don\u2019t know how I would\u2019ve done that.\u201d<\/p>\n

This, obviously, isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Still, when hallucination<\/a> remains a challenge for AI products, it may be concerning to imagine relying so heavily on a chat AI for baby-care answers.<\/p>\n

But parents have been known to turn to many a questionable source for information in the middle of the night. My colleagues with children describe the \u201cbottomless pit\u201d of Google, and the minefield of parenting Facebook groups. Is ChatGPT really much different than taking the advice of someone online who\u2019s insisting that you are a neglectful caretaker if you aren\u2019t basing your baby\u2019s bed time on the current phase of the moon?<\/p>\n

Perhaps the idea of parents using AI in search for child-raising answers is less of a \u201cprimal alarm bell\u201d than the idea of very young children using it, which Altman also discussed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s this video that always has stuck with me of a baby, or a little toddler, with one of those old glossy magazines [tapping] the [cover],\u201d Altman said. The child thought that the magazine was an iPad. \u201cKids born now will just think that the world always had extremely smart AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe got tired of talking to his kid about Thomas the Tank Engine, so he put ChatGPT into voice mode\u2026 An hour later, the kid\u2019s still talking about Thomas the train,\u201d Mayne said gleefully.<\/p>\n

\u201cKids love voice mode,\u201d Altman interjected.<\/p>\n

As today\u2019s parents turn to ChatGPT for all sorts of similar uses, this will likely end up reflecting the same repetitive discourse around the \u201ciPad kid\u201d generation (yes, it\u2019s probably bad to let your kid watch hours and hours of \u201cCocomelon\u201d; no, it\u2019s not fair to expect parents to occupy their kids\u2019 time 24\/7).<\/p>\n

But existing children\u2019s media is at least, for now, created by a team of humans, while ChatGPT\u2019s own policies recommend it not be used by children under age 13.<\/a> It does not have a vetted parental controls mode. Even Altman is aware of the risks, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not all going to be good. There will be problems,\u201d Altman said. \u201cPeople will develop these somewhat problematic, or maybe very problematic parasocial relationships, and society will have to figure out new guardrails.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe upsides will be tremendous!\u201d Altman said. \u201cSociety in general is good at figuring how to mitigate the downsides.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Across hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, an impossible question has befuddled our species: Why is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":195768,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,1318,20208,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-195767","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-openai","11":"tag-sam-altman","12":"tag-technology","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114707218204270997","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}