My son is in a Fantasy Football mini-league with some school pals, administered by a WhatsApp chat that last week issued a playful injunction. \u201cA reminder,\u201d it said, \u201cthe boys are the managers and they make the decisions. We can provide guidance, but only human brains are allowed \u2013 no ChatGPT or other AI tools please.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a detester of AI<\/a>, I cheered at this, but not because my son is a devotee of the game. Far from it. When we first set up the team, I randomised a default squad and then he spent 10 enjoyable minutes moving players around \u2013 he wanted a goalkeeper he\u2019d heard of, more Liverpool stars and insisted on having Erling Haaland. Once I explained that a host of his faves would need to be replaced with less expensive players to justify the presence of Man City\u2019s freakish Norseman, he lost interest entirely and never returned.<\/p>\n This was striking for two main reasons. For one thing, it was proof that the Premier League\u2019s Official Fantasy Football Game enforces stricter rules for signing a fantasy Erling Haaland than Man City experienced signing the real deal. Secondly, despite my son\u2019s love of soccer nerdery, Fantasy Football just doesn\u2019t excite him at all. In a perfect world, this would be a moderately interesting personality contradiction I wouldn\u2019t have to think about very much, like the fact that Guy Fieri hates eggs, or that Clint Eastwood is allergic to horses. Except now he\u2019s in a league, which means every single week I feel the wrench of futility as I either ignore the team entirely or, worse, become tempted to get in there and make changes on his behalf.<\/p>\n Looking at his unchanged team, filled with injured or inactive players, overloaded with star names who aren\u2019t providing the goods, I don\u2019t want to be that kind of dad \u2013 the kind who grumpily orders their child to leave him them alone as the child puts the finishing touches to a science project he\u2019s clearly done entirely by himself. <\/p>\n My own dad avoided this by not really knowing anything that was going on in my school for my entire childhood. I think he only knew I went to school because he\u2019d often see me wearing a uniform. I don\u2019t want to be that hands-off myself and, in fairness, given I\u2019m not a widower with 11 school-aged children, I feel such a path would be less justifiable in my case.<\/p>\n AI only supercharges this struggle between presence and absence. Last week, former Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer<\/a> told the New York Times her daughter\u2019s teacher \u201cwanted three bullet points summarising what made her special\u201d. Mayer, who has presumably met her 10-year-old, simply asked an AI assistant to provide these three qualities and it came back with the staggeringly bland trio of \u201cempathetic\u201d, \u201ccreative\u201d, and \u201canimal lover\u201d. So delighted was she by the results that she told this harrowing story, out loud, to America\u2019s paper of record.<\/p>\n In July, OpenAI<\/a> chief executive Sam Altman<\/a> raved about a \u201ccool use case\u201d of his product ChatGPT<\/a>: \u201cEvery morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid\u2019s soccer game that afternoon, one kid\u2019s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.\u201d In other words, advice that charts bold new frontiers in refusing to talk to your children.<\/p>\n Perhaps worse again was a post from AI researcher Alvin Sng, which transcribed a conversation in which his wife asked him to read a bedtime story to their baby. \u201cI can just play an audiobook from my phone,\u201d he said. \u201cBut then it won\u2019t be in your voice,\u201d she replied. \u201cI can train a voice model,\u201d he said, victoriously, before signing off his tweet with \u201cparenting hits different when you work in AI\u201d.<\/p>\n