Sam Altman has appeared in the first episode of the new Operai podcast, called Simply the Operai Podcast, which is now available to Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
The podcast is organized by Andrew Mayne and in the first episode, the CEO of Openai, Sam Altman, joins the host to talk about the future of AI: GPT-5 and AGI to project Stargate, new research and raising workflows.
Attend
While it is always worth paying attention to Altman’s thoughts about AGI, it was his advice on raising ia what caught my attention this time.
You should ask yourself if Altman’s public relations advisors have taken the day off, because after the softball question is asked, “you have recently become a new father, how is Chatgpt helping you with that?”, In some way, Altman leads us to a nightmare stage of a generation of children with AI who have lost the ability to communicate with regular humanes in favor of their parasocial relationships with chatgpt.
“My children will never be smarter than AI,” says Altman in a factor. “But they will also grow much more capable than we were when we grew up. They can do things that we cannot imagine and they will be really good for using ia. And obviously, I think about that a lot, but I think that much more about what we will not have not …
All of that sounds great, but then in the conversation he says: “Again, I suspect that this will not be good, there will be problems and people will develop these problematic relationships or something problematic and parasocial.”
In case you wonder what are the “parasocial relationships”, they develop when we begin to consider personalities of the famous media or people as friends, despite not having real interactions with them; The way we all think that we know George Clooney because he is that friend of ER, or his films or Nespresso’s announcement, when, in fact, we have never met him, and we will probably never do it.
Mitigating disadvantages
Altman is characterizing the interactions of a child with Chatgpt in the same way, but curiously it does not offer any solution for a generation in the advanced chatgpt voice mode instead of human interaction. Instead, he sees it as a problem for society to discover.
“The advantages will be tremendous and society in general is good to discover how to mitigate disadvantages,” Altman says to the viewer.
I will now admit to be of a more cynical inclination, but this seems terribly as if it has washed the hands of a problem that OpenAi is creating. Any potential problem that a generation of children raised interacting with Chatgpt will experience, apparently, is not Openai’s concern.
In fact, before, when the Podcast presenter presented the example story of a father who uses the advanced chatgpt voice to talk to his son about Thomas The Tank Engine, instead of doing so, because they are bored of talking about him incessantly, Altman simply nods and says: “Children love the voice mode in Chatgpt.”
In fact, they do Sam, but is it advisable to let your child release in the advanced chatgpt voice mode without supervision? As a father myself (although now of much older children) I feel uncomfortable when listening to young children who are given what sounds like an access without supervision to chatgpt.
AI comes with all kinds of warnings for a reason. You can make mistakes, you can give bad advice, and you can hallucinate things that are not true. Not to mention that “Chatgpt is not intended for children under 13 years old” according to Openei’s own guidelines, and I can’t imagine that there are many children over 13 who are interested in talking about Thomas The Tank Engine!
I have no problems using chatgpt with my children, but when Chatgpt was available, they were both over 13 years old. If I were using it with younger children, I would always make sure they were not using it on their own.
I am not suggesting that Altman is somehow a bad father, and I appreciate his enthusiasm for AI, but I think he should leave the advice for raising experts for now.
