‘Kid-pilled’ Sam Altman ‘constantly’ asked ChatGPT questions about his newborn

Summary

Across hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, an impossible question has befuddled our species: Why is the baby crying?! Sam Altman, who is both the father of a 3-month-old and CEO of OpenAI, hopped on OpenAI’s new podcast today to talk about how his company is impacting his experience with fatherhood. Altman, who describes himself as “extremely kid-pilled,” said he was “constantly” using ChatGPT to ask questions about the behavior of babies during the first few weeks of his son’s life — now that he’s a bit more settled, he’s using ChatGPT to ask more general questions about children’s developmental stages. “I mean, clearly, people have been able to take care of babies without ChatGPT for a long time,” Altman said. “I don’t know how I would’ve done that.” This, obviously, isn’t 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. 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. My colleagues with children describe the “bottomless pit” of Google, and the minefield of parenting Facebook groups. Is ChatGPT really much different than taking the advice of someone online who’s insisting that you are a neglectful caretaker if you aren’t basing your baby’s 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. “There’s this video that always has stuck with me of a baby, or a little toddler, with one of those old glossy magazines [tapping] the screen,” Altman said. The child thought that the magazine was an iPad. “...