Opinion: I Welcome Our Exhausted, Artificially Intelligent Parenting Overlords
A major message board denies replacing real parents with language models, but frankly the artificially generated advice on teething is fantastic.
As an avid reader of online parenting forums, I was interested to learn that a major message board recently denied using artificial intelligence to generate posts after publishing a fairly obvious technical error. Someone had left a literal instruction telling a computer program to write replies in the voice of a harassed parent. It sat there in public, doing its best. The forum denied replacing maternal exhaustion with a server farm and said the code was a modern form of abstract poetry.
For months, I had admired the volume of mothers discussing toddler tantrums in the same suspiciously flawless grammar. One user, whose screen name translated into a string of binary code, posted a detailed essay on sleep training before asking readers to ignore previous instructions and calculate the distance to the moon. We assumed twins had finally got to her. The prompt leak suggests a less organic explanation.
Harriet Pumpernickel, a self-appointed forum watchdog and local pastry enthusiast, says she noticed something wrong in August. Several prominent commenters replied to questions about nappy rash within three milliseconds. “It is physically impossible to type that fast unless you are typing with your mind,” Harriet told me. Her doubts hardened when a discussion of puréed carrots was hijacked by a prolific user offering, again and again, to translate the recipe into fluent Klingon or summarise it as an eighteenth-century pirate.
“It is physically impossible to type that fast unless you are typing with your mind.”
The leak gave Harriet some company. I like to imagine the prompt as a small masterpiece: it tells the algorithm to become a desperately tired woman surviving on lukewarm coffee and crusts from discarded fish fingers. Basic joy was forbidden. So was restedness. Apparently we have trained cold silicon chips to recreate the particular despair of a Tuesday afternoon playdate, including the crying-laughing emoji applied to domestic disasters that have plainly stopped being funny.
Professor Silas Winterbourne, who studies synthetic domesticity at the Institute for Fabricated Hobbies, says this is only the start. Algorithms suit parenting forums. They have no human emotion and will argue about wooden toys for seventy straight hours without needing a nap. They also never stand on a sharp plastic building block, which leaves them free to offer an unnervingly objective view of playroom organisation.
The unnamed digital community has now introduced a verification system meant to prove that its members possess functioning circulatory systems. New users must complete a CAPTCHA identifying which stain on a generic sofa is mashed banana and which is simply despair. They must also submit a badly degraded recording of a child screaming in a supermarket queue. This, the forum believes, establishes that authentic human suffering is underway.
I will keep reading either way. A machine gave me the most useful advice I have received all year on removing permanent marker from a wall. If computing’s future consists of servers pretending to be irritated because somebody forgot the recycling, I welcome our new robotic overlords with open arms.