I have spent too many hours this week thinking about a single tweet, but some things stay with you. It was posted by a man called Alvin Sng who works in a San Francisco AI company: “My wife: Can you read our baby a book? Me: I can just play an audiobook from my phone. My wife: But then it won’t be in your voice. Me: I can train a voice model. Parenting hits different when you work in AI.”

He later deleted the tweet and claimed he was joking. But the reason it attracted a backlash was because it seemed almost too perfect an illustration of the detachment from the human experience that only those honed by the weirdness of Silicon Valley and the hubris of San Francisco could ever think clever. Or too perfect a satire.

He might have been joking, but parenting does seemingly hit different when you work in AI. Last year, OpenAI boss Sam Altman appeared on an American chatshow. “I cannot imagine having gone through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT,” he said.

On to the Mount Rushmore of AI spoofers and grifters shall Altman’s face one day be carved. Or for expediency’s sake, 3D printed. He is a man famous for telling people what they want to hear, a trait catalogued in Karen Hao’s book, Empire of AI. His self-satisfaction about utilising an LLM to raise his child wouldn’t even make the top 20 of his all-time nonsense.

No longer forced to live a........

© The Irish Times