Josh was at the end of his rope when he turned to ChatGPT for help with a parenting quandary. The 40-year-old father of two had been listening to his “super loquacious” four-year-old talk about Thomas the Tank Engine for 45 minutes, and he was feeling overwhelmed.
“He was not done telling the story that he wanted to tell, and I needed to do my chores, so I let him have the phone,” recalled Josh, who lives in north-west Ohio. “I thought he would finish the story and the phone would turn off.”
But when Josh returned to the living room two hours later, he found his child still happily chatting away with ChatGPT in voice mode. “The transcript is over 10k words long,” he confessed in a sheepish Reddit post. “My son thinks ChatGPT is the coolest train loving person in the world. The bar is set so high now I am never going to be able to compete with that.”
I’m so disheartened. I’m bracing for the first news article about some terrible parent’s young child seeing a Sora AI video of their friend jumping off a building and flying away, thinking it’s real, then trying to repeat it.
It’s only one of many shitty things that could happen. Please don’t let kids play with devices without supervision.
I’d honestly be most worried about them being essentially raised by an ass-kissing sycophantic llm. That shit is already messing with some adults, i couldn’t imagine what it’d do to a child.
a whole generation of narcissists maybe? I mean, sure, kids need encouragement. But just being told that everything you say is a great idea, your a genius, wow, you’re so amazing, over and over…
and then combine that with social media that’s already messing with kids self esteem and social skills shudder
Happened a lot in 50’s or 60’s where kids thought they were Superman and jumped off the roof of their houses.