02.08.2026
4 min
19
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has proposed an unusual way to use ChatGPT in everyday life. His idea is for the chatbot to generate personalized morning podcasts for children based on the family’s calendar and their individual interests. The concept quickly went viral, but instead of widespread praise, it sparked a wave of criticism across social media.
In his post on X, Altman described the idea as a “cool use case for ChatGPT.” He suggested connecting the chatbot to a family’s calendars, providing information about the children’s interests, and having it generate a short personalized podcast every morning for the drive to school.
According to Altman, the podcast could include reminders about one child’s soccer game, another’s upcoming birthday, relevant news, or other updates tailored to the family’s interests. As of Sunday, the post had attracted more than 11.6 million views, over 11,000 likes, nearly 4,000 comments, and around 3,600 reposts.
The reaction, however, was far from universally positive. One of the most widely shared responses came from American animator Alex Hirsch, creator of Gravity Falls, who replied with a simple question: “What if you just talked to your children?”
Hirsch’s response quickly outperformed Altman’s original post, collecting around 185,000 likes, 16,000 reposts, and 2.7 million views. On the same day, Hirsch also criticized Google’s AI-powered image generation feature for Google Earth, which was discontinued just one day after its launch.
Many other users were equally skeptical. One of the most popular replies joked, “Yeah, my dad’s AI generates podcasts about my upcoming birthday instead of talking to me on the way to school.” Another commenter wrote, “It’s incredible how disconnected these tech people are from normal human behavior.”
Not everyone disagreed with Altman’s proposal, however. One user argued that teenagers often do not want to talk to their parents, especially in the morning, and suggested that a personalized podcast could actually serve as a conversation starter. They even proposed intentionally including a mistake in each episode to encourage children to spot it and start a discussion.
This is not the first time Altman has spoken about parenting in the context of artificial intelligence. During an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2025, he admitted: “I cannot imagine raising a newborn without ChatGPT.”
He immediately added that people had successfully raised children for generations without AI, but acknowledged that he personally relied heavily on ChatGPT when looking for answers to questions about caring for his newborn.
At the same time, Altman’s latest comments contrast with his own earlier remarks about the technology. Earlier this year, during an OpenAI podcast, he warned that people tend to place too much trust in ChatGPT despite its well-known limitations.
“People have a very high degree of trust in ChatGPT, which is interesting because, for example, AI hallucinates. This should be a technology you don’t trust that much,” Altman said at the time.
His latest post on X also comes as OpenAI faces ongoing lawsuits filed by several families who claim that the company’s chatbot contributed to the deaths of their children. OpenAI denies those allegations, and the legal cases are still ongoing.
