AI-obsessed moms and dads are using the tech for parenting in bizarre and downright dystopian ways that’ll bring out your inner luddite.

In a new Business Insider piece, a cognitive neuroscientist named Sarah Baldeo described how she spent the past year traveling for work. Her solution to stay present for her 15-year-old son while she was away: building a custom AI clone of herself.

Baldeo says she programmed the chatbot with her personality by uploading screenshots of texts between her and her son, as well as documents outlining her values and family rules. She encouraged her son to ask the AI advice — which he did. 

Being a teenager, the son used the chatbot in some creative ways. One of the questions he asked the AI was how to convince his flesh and blood mom to let him hang out at a coffee shop in Chicago, producing the kind of platitudinal spiel we’ve come to expect from the tech. (“Your mom very much values new experiences,” it began.)

“My instinctual reaction after the fact was, ‘oh my gosh, I was manipulated by my own reasoning,'” Baldeo told BI. “I reflected on it and I thought, that’s a really clever way to use it, because that’s not how I built it.”

Parents have been experimenting with using AI to make their lives a little easier since the tech went mainstream, but it now feels like it’s gaining more momentum than before.

Some of the biggest advocates have been tech leaders. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently recommended that parents could connect their family calendars to ChatGPT and use the AI to create podcasts that could talk to kids about their day and interests while riding in the car to school. He previously said that he couldn’t imagine “figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT,” admitting that he heavily relies on the AI to help him be a father.

AI companies are capitalizing on this niche. BI spoke to a couple who are interested in using an AI wearable called Omi that constantly listens in on your daily life (the father is pushing for it, while the mother is skeptical). One custom feature it supports called Parent Whisperer records and summarizes conversations that parents have with their child, according to BI, and can supposedly alert parents when their child might be feeling upset by listening to the tone of their voice.

Meta, meanwhile, is working on an AI app called “StoryKit” that automatically generates and reads personalized bedtime stories for children. Numerous online services already let parents generate AI children’s stories that they can insert their offspring into.

The social network for moms app Peanut is also taking note of this trend. President of Peanut Michelle Battersby said her team noticed that moms were asking community members if they agreed with the parenting advice they got from an AI, instead of solely trusting the AI’s advice. Its takeaway from this was perhaps counterintuitive: Peanut added an AI tool that would search the Peanut community for answers and regurgitate them back to the uncertain, inquiring parent.

“We don’t see moms using AI to make parenting more efficient,” she told BI. “We see them coming to AI to help them navigate uncertainty.”

Of course, perhaps these parents should be worried about the long-term cognitive and social effects for both parent and child of constantly talking to and relying on AI chatbots.

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