OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman is trending on X for suggesting that parents use ChatGPT to generate podcasts about their children’s lives in lieu of… listening to them.
“cool use case of chatgpt work i heard last night,” he shared on X in all lowercase. “connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests.”
He continued, “Every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.”
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The post has amassed around 9,500 likes at the time of this writing, dwarfed by 120,000 likes on the reply, “What if you just talked to your children?” from Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch. (The same day, Hirsch also criticized Google’s addition of its AI image generator into Google Earth, which it reversed.) Other popular replies have the same sentiment: That Altman is apparently encouraging users to disconnect from their families.
The backlash about AI tools has ramped up in recent years, for a myriad of reasons, including environmental impacts, surveillance, job loss, and fears of AI psychosis. The potential degrading of relationships is also a concern for some, as more people turn to chatbots to outsource relational conflicts or even seek to replace relationships themselves.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
