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.”
When my 4 year old is rattling on, I listen. The people we love are so easily taken for granted. If some horrible shit happens, are you going to be cool about having palmed off your kid into an llm because you couldn’t be fucked.
This morning I listened to my daughter ramble about her dream where she gave a camel a pat, but then there was a nicer camel in another enclosure and it let her hug it. Every moment is gold.
I miss hanging out with kids. I don’t see myself ever becoming a parent, but I really enjoy just sitting and listening to kids natter about anything and everything.