Is anyone else curious about the prompt engineering Sam Altman is using to get ChatGPT to help raise his baby?
Becoming a parent has been both the hardest and most rewarding job anyone could ever ask for. And let me tell you - our second child hit the jackpot, because of all the things we’ve learned from our elder son!
As parents, we’re constantly looking for life hacks - ways to do things better, encountering situations we’ve never considered.
- I frenetically search Google for things I don’t understand.
- Spend all my Amazon No-Rush Reward balance on books teaching me about dealing with temper tantrums.
- Send pictures of all sorts of (too gross to share) things to our pediatrician for advice.
- Watch oodles of YouTube videos on kid-proofing, how to assemble awesome magnetic tile structures…
- And let’s not even mention the mom-influencers my wife has discovered on TikTok.
And now, there’s AI.
What gets lost in the answer
It’s always been buyer beware on whom to trust for parenting advice. But here’s what’s been nagging at me: does something get lost when AI just gives us the answer?
The process of knowledge growth isn’t just about getting the “right” answer. It’s about understanding the alternatives - seeing the wrong answers helps us appreciate what’s right and what’s not.
When I struggled with sleep training, I read conflicting advice from pediatricians, talked to other parents, weighed different approaches. That process taught me about my values as a parent, not just sleep schedules.
AI can give me a perfectly crafted response about toddler tantrums. But did I learn anything about my kid, or did I just get a generic solution?
The messy process is the point
There’s something powerful about the messy process of figuring things out - talking to people who disagree, trying things that don’t work, building your own parenting intuition.
The efficiency of AI answers is incredible. But I sometimes think that just getting easy answers makes us “less capable” as parents, people, professionals.
But perhaps I’m living in a little bubble, stuck in my ways of parenting. If you’re a parent, I’m curious - what parenting advice did you ask your AI (and did you trust the answer)?
If you’re building in this space, I’d love to compare notes on where AI augments parents and where it should get out of the way. Drop me a line.
