ChatGPT Boss's Child-Rearing Idea Sends Chills, Like Something from Another World
Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – A child-rearing idea proposed by OpenAI founder Sam Altman has triggered an outpouring of criticism from netizens. The suggestion was that precious moments spent with one’s children should be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI).
In his post, Altman described what he considered a fun way to use ChatGPT. According to him, parents could connect the family calendar and enter their children’s interests into the AI system.
“Every morning on the drive to school, ask AI to create a broadcast discussing one child’s football match, upcoming birthdays, and the latest news,” he wrote, as quoted by Futurism on Monday (3/8/2026).
The proposal, however, was met with a harsh reaction. Many felt it amounted to letting machines take over parents’ primary role of communicating directly with their children.
One of the most-liked responses came from animation director Alex Hirsch.
“How about you just talk to your kids?” he wrote, briefly but pointedly. His reply garnered nearly twenty times more engagement than Altman’s original post.
Several other figures voiced similar concerns. Comedian Gianmarco Soresi considered the idea entirely inappropriate. He was astonished that the leading figure in AI development could be so far removed from the everyday life of ordinary people.
“It keeps playing on my mind. Not only because the idea is bad, but because he is the person most aggressively selling AI to the wider public, without realising that many people simply do not want it,” he said.
Interestingly, a more sensible perspective came from Altman’s own close colleague. OpenAI president Greg Brockman acknowledged that humans still prioritise human-to-human connection over machine substitutes.
In his post, Brockman noted that many employees connect the company’s conversational AI service to internal work systems. Yet colleagues, it turned out, were not pleased when assisted by a robot.
“People don’t like it when a co-worker asks for help through AI, even though they would happily help if asked directly by a human,” he wrote.
This confirms that society expects AI to lighten the workload and create more quality time, not to become a barrier in human relationships.
Altman has long been vocal about his views on AI. Appearing on a talk show with Jimmy Fallon late last year, he said he found it impossible to raise children without AI assistance.
He has also expressed another controversial view: that his children may not be more intelligent than artificial intelligence, but will be far more capable. Altman has acknowledged the risk of unhealthy relationships between humans and machines, and admitted that AI output is sometimes not entirely trustworthy because it frequently produces fabricated information.