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.”
Hotter take: “individual responsibility” is propaganda from the corporations that sell dangerous products and the politicians they have contracts with.
There’s nothing wrong with selling guns, the problem is people who use guns irresponsibly, say the gun companies.
There’s nothing wrong with prescribing opioids for everything, the problem is people who can’t control themselves and get themselves addicted, say the pharmaceutical companies.
And in this case, when there’s a massive propaganda campaign trying to sell AI as an educational tool and good for children, it just feels wrong to blame a parent for using an AI tool the way it was marketed for use.
We’re going to encourage you to use this dangerous tool without warning you of the risks? And if you or your children take harm from it we’re going to blame you for using it wrong? Never mind individual responsibility, what happened to corporate responsibility?
Corporate responsibility is likely never going to happen unfortunately, so long as those currently in power continue to consolidate it. Unless one or more of them suffer actual consequences for their negligence, we’re just going to keep seeing more of the same.
A populace that is informed of how and why these corporations weasel around punishments is key to responsible decision making. Unfortunately, we don’t have that yet either.
The trick is to keep talking about corporate responsibility - and so making people aware of how corporations avoid it, and normalizing the idea that corporations have responsibility - instead of dismissing it with discouraging phrases like “it’ll never happen”.
Hope is hard. That’s why it’s so important.