“You have all these people running these AI companies that actually don’t reflect the society that’s using them, or the needs of moms, who tend to be the heads of households,” she says.

Erin Grau, a cofounder of the research and corporate training company Charter, speculates working mothers may use AI less due to “mom guilt”—viewing dependence on AI as a form of “cheating.”

For this reason, many prominent women in tech and media have focused on closing that gap by framing generative AI as a tool of women’s empowerment. “It has exploded. It has accelerated,” Mel Robbins, who recently announced a partnership with Microsoft Copilot, dramatically intones in an episode of The Mel Robbins Podcast from November. “I don’t want to get left behind. I don’t want women in particular to get left behind.” In April, Reese Witherspoon also went viral for an Instagram post in which she chirped about how the tech would “make our everyday lives easier and better,” prompting the Cut to bemoan “the girlbossification of AI.”

Sarah Dooley, a former tech consultant for brands like Visa, started using generative AI in 2023 to make up toothbrushing songs for her three daughters and to write notes to her babysitter. She started hosting in-person small groups for moms to teach them how to use generative AI to delegate household tasks, leading to her quitting her job and starting her brand, the AI-Empowered Mom. She now works full-time doing consulting for companies to teach women how to use AI, and has a book called The AI-Empowered Family coming out next year.

Dooley and Schmidt regularly field angry comments accusing them of promoting a technology that not only has deleterious environmental impacts, but also is positioned to put nearly 15 percent of the workforce at risk of unemployment, according to one projection. There’s also the very real risk posed by generative AI on children’s development and mental health.

The AI momfluencers I spoke with share some of these concerns. “The way Reese Witherspoon, Mel Robbins, and others are kind of positioning AI as radical feminism—I feel like if you use women’s insecurity or AI being feminist as the entry point, you’ve kind of lost the plot,” says Leblanc-Godfrey, adding, “I reject that sort of productivity porn, toxic efficiency piece of the conversation.”

While most momfluencers concede that the risks to the environment or the human workforce are real, those worries tend to take a backseat to framing AI literacy as a tool of liberation from household drudgery, similar to the invention of the vacuum cleaner or the washing machine in the mid-20th century. “Women already have so many reservations about using this tool,” says Schmidt. “And we just don’t need another one.”

Still, questions remain—for instance, why is the onus on women to learn how to use AI to make their households run more efficiently, and where are the dads in all this? Schmidt says that while 95 percent of her audience is female, she does regularly receive emails from dads hoping to use AI to ease their partners’ workloads. She does, however, note that these messages are fewer and further between than those from women, and they tend to be in private DMs rather than public comments. When I ask her why she thinks this is the case, she only semi-jokingly says, “the patriarchy.”

“Unfortunately, mental load is still considered a female problem,” she says. “A lot of men don't even know what mental load even is.”

I tried out some chatbot parenting myself, but just getting set up—entering lines and lines of text into the prompt field to spell out the mundanity of my everyday mom tasks—filled me with existential dread. It stressed me out to see the sheer volume of all of my quotidian household responsibilities in aggregate. It felt like AI, much like the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine, didn’t make my life as a mom more efficient, so much as it was a slightly flashier means of continuing to tether me to the home.

Frankly, it also made me angry that I still had to shoulder the majority of these responsibilities to begin with. My husband, for instance, regularly uses Claude to research the stock market, or to boost his efficiency in his job as an architect. But it would never occur to him to use it to keep track of birthday parties and doctor’s appointments.

As much as technology can help to alleviate the mental load, it does nothing to eliminate the fact that women still assume that responsibility to begin with.

Learning to use AI to make my life easier struck me as just another item to add to my already-ballooning to-do list, without addressing any of the underlying issues that make that list as long as it is to begin with. As Leblanc-Godfrey puts it, “These tools were built for people with spare time. And guess what? Moms don’t have any.”