Engineer called ‘horrible father’ for joking about using AI to read bedtime stories
A Silicon Valley engineer faced significant social media backlash after joking about using AI to read bedtime stories to his newborn instead of doing it himself. Critics argued the post reflected a cold, disconnected attitude toward parenting and the misuse of AI technology.
Why it matters
The incident highlights growing public anxiety regarding the encroachment of AI into intimate human relationships and the ethics of automating parental responsibilities.
An attempt at tech humor by a Silicon Valley engineer has sparked widespread online backlash, after a software engineer joked about training an artificial intelligence (AI) voice model to read bedtime stories to his newborn child instead of doing it himself. Alvin Sng, a software engineer at the San Francisco-based AI research lab Factory, shared an exchange between himself and his wife on X (formerly Twitter) that quickly went viral for all the wrong reasons.According to Sng’s post (first reported by The New York Post), his wife asked him: “Can you read our baby a book?” When Sng suggested playing a standard audiobook instead, his wife pushed back, explaining that a pre-recorded tape would not be in his voice.“Me: I can train a voice model.
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