The one thing you can't outsource
Every day my boys come home from school and I ask how it went.
Every day I get the same two words. "School was fine."
If you're a parent, you know exactly the feeling. That answer is a closed door, and getting behind it is the whole job of raising them.
I recently read about an idea from Sam Altman, the man who runs the world's biggest AI company, a way around that door. He called it a "cool use case" for ChatGPT.
Connect your family calendars, tell it what your kids are into, and every morning on the drive to school it makes a little podcast about their day. One kid's football match that afternoon, another's birthday coming up, some news.
His post got around 9,600 likes.
A reply from Alex Hirsch, the creator of Gravity Falls, got more than 122,000. It was one line. "What if you just talked to your children."
That gap tells you something. It isn't that people hate AI. It's that someone suggested a machine could summarise their own child back to them, and something in the gut said no.
I build AI for a living. I'm not in the anti-tech camp. But I think the gut was right, and it's worth saying exactly why.
There's a line I keep coming back to.
AI should make you a better parent, not do the parenting for you.
Most of what a family runs on can be handed to a machine. The calendar, the reminders, the grocery list, the quiz question at dinner. Hand all of it over, honestly.
The one thing you cannot outsource is knowing your own child.
When they answer "School was fine," what I actually want to know:
- Is he happy at school?
- Is anyone being unkind to him?
- Is he following what the teacher is teaching, or nodding along and lost?
- Is he learning new skills?
An AI briefing can tell me he has a cricket match at four. It can't tell me a single one of those.
Go deeper
Letting AI handle the morning drive sounds tempting. It doesn't feel like outsourcing. It feels like being on top of things.
Picture it. A calm voice in the car, briefing everyone about the day, keeping the kids engaged. What could be wrong with that?
Everything!
Every morning I drive my younger one to school. It's a 15-minute drive, and those 15 minutes are ours. Pure, uninterrupted time to talk about anything, imaginary worlds, complete nonsense, whatever comes up. It's one of the most pleasurable parts of my day.
And I'm sure it's the same for a lot of families. It's one of the only windows in the day when you and your kid are stuck together with nothing else pulling at either of you. No homework, no TV, no relatives in the room.
Some of the most imaginative questions my younger one has ever asked me came out sideways in that car.
Now imagine filling that quiet with a podcast about their own lives.
And notice who's making the pitch. Altman has also said he can't imagine raising his own newborn without ChatGPT, and that his kids will "never be smarter than AI, but they'll be vastly more capable." His own son is about a year and a half old. OpenAI is fighting a string of lawsuits from families who say the chatbot harmed their children. I don't say that to dunk on him. I say it because when the person building the tool tells you he'd route his own parenting through it, it can nudge other parents to do the same, and slowly hand over the human part of raising a child, the part in them and the part in their kids.
- A briefing about your kid isn't the same as giving attention to your kid.
- Outsource the logistics, keep the relationship. Let AI run the calendar. You run the conversation.
- Silence in the car isn't a problem to solve. Sit with it, and that's often when they open up.
One more thing
The reply that won, "what if you just talked to your children," landed because it was almost embarrassingly obvious. And maybe that's the point.
As a father, I don't have to be an expert or be on top of everything.
The most important thing I do as a father is to be the fun, goofy person in their life. The one they can come to about anything, without feeling judged or embarrassed, without worrying about being right or wrong, knowing I'm always there. That's how I hear nothing but the truth from them.
Spend time with your kids. Enjoy the drive.
Some days you won't get the answer you want, or they'll be off in their own world. That's fine. You're not running a briefing. You're being there, and that's all that matters.
Thank you for reading. If this resonated, grab my free 80% Rule guide, the framework for using AI with your kids without making them dumber. You'll get the weekly newsletter too.
PS: If you ever find a way past the "school was fine" answer, tell me the trick.
Sources: Altman's post, Hirsch's reply, TechCrunch, Fortune, AOL.