Hajra Naz
Sam Altman posted something on Friday that he clearly thought was clever. He described a “cool use case” for OpenAI’s new product, ChatGPT Work: parents linking up their family calendars and telling the AI about their kids’ interests. Then, every morning on the school run, the AI would generate a podcast covering one kid’s soccer match later that day, another kid’s upcoming birthday, and a bit of news.
The internet did not agree that this was cool.
Alex Hirsch, the guy behind “Gravity Falls,” summed up the backlash in one line. His response asked, essentially, why not just talk to your own kids instead.
That single sentence outperformed Altman’s original post by a wide margin. As of Saturday morning, Altman’s tweet had around 300 reposts and roughly 9,600 likes. Hirsch’s reply had already crossed 9,000 reposts and pulled in about 122,000 likes.
This isn’t the first time a tech executive has pitched AI as a fix for the awkward, human parts of daily life—especially the morning commute. Last year, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella admitted he’d swapped his usual podcasts for chatbot conversations about those same podcasts during his drive. Somehow that felt like an upgrade to him.
Altman has talked about parenting through an AI lens before. During an appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s show late last year, he said he genuinely couldn’t picture navigating the newborn stage without ChatGPT by his side. He did add, almost as an afterthought, that people managed to raise kids just fine for a very long time without it.
Read More: Sam Altman Says People on Social Media Now Talk Like AI
Winning over parents looks like a real strategic push for OpenAI right now, not just a one-off comment. The company recently listed a job opening for a product manager who understands how to build trust with families — the kind of sensitive, careful work that comes with marketing to households. Meta is chasing something similar, quietly testing an AI app that reads bedtime stories to kids.
There’s a harder side to all this, though. OpenAI has rolled out parental safety tools for ChatGPT. At the same time, the company is fighting several lawsuits from families who claim the chatbot played a part in relatives’ delusions or suicides. OpenAI’s response so far has been fairly standard corporate language — something about continuously improving the models’ handling of sensitive conversations.
Whether that’s reassuring probably depends on how you feel about a machine generating your kid’s morning news briefing in the first place.
