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.”
From radio and television to video games and tablets, new technology has long tantalized overstretched parents of preschool-age kids with the promise of entertainment and enrichment that does not require their direct oversight, even as it carried the hint of menace that accompanies any outside influence on the domestic sphere. A century ago, mothers in Arizona worried that radio programs were “overstimulating, frightening and emotionally overwhelming” for children; today’s parents self-flagellate over screen time and social media.
But the startlingly lifelike capabilities of generative AI systems have left many parents wondering if AI is an entirely new beast. Chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) are engaging young children in ways the makers of board games, Teddy Ruxpin, Furby and even the iPad never dreamed of: they produce personalized bedtime stories, carry on conversations tailored to a child’s interests, and generate photorealistic images of the most far-fetched flights of fancy – all for a child who can not yet read, write or type.
Can generative AI deliver the holy grail of technological assistance to parents, serving as a digital Mary Poppins that educates, challenges and inspires, all within a framework of strong moral principles and age-appropriate safety? Or is this all just another Silicon Valley hype-bubble with a particularly vulnerable group of beta testers?
‘My kids are the guinea pigs’
For Saral Kaushik, a 36-year-old software engineer and father of two in Yorkshire, a packet of freeze-dried “astronaut” ice-cream in the cupboard provided the inspiration for a novel use of ChatGPT with his four-year-old son.
“I literally just said something like, ‘I’m going to do a voice call with my son and I want you to pretend that you’re an astronaut on the ISS,’” Kaushik said. He also instructed the program to tell the boy that it had sent him a special treat.
“[ChatGPT] told him that he had sent his dad some ice-cream to try from space, and I pulled it out,” Kaushik recalled. “He was really excited to talk to the astronaut. He was…
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