Don't Want to Spend Time With Your Kids? Train an AI Voice Model of Yourself to Read Them Bedtime Stories
futurism.com
A tech worker bragged that he would rather create an AI clone of his voice to read to his newborn baby than read to it himself.
        • NateNate60@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          19 days ago

          Is that even true? That might only be in relation to other animals, not to robots. Humans do a lot of useless things like fart and laugh. Robots don’t. Even from an energy perspective, if a human takes 2,000 kilocalories to go about their day, that’s 8,400,000 joules or 2.3 kWh. A laptop battery is around 75 Wh, so that’s around 30 laptop batteries for 16 hours of activity, many of which might just be sitting down at a desk to think.

            • NateNate60@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              19 days ago

              This is a post about AI. While a computer will probably not in the near future be able to simulate a human brain fully, artificial intelligence models are getting scarily close to being able to pretend to do everything that a human can do. That’s what I was getting at. But of course, one should still not lose track of the overall point here that replacing the human experience with AI is completely missing the plot, even if it is “more efficient”.

                • NateNate60@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  18 days ago

                  Megawatts to serve hundreds of thousands of users. The reason AI data centres are so wasteful with electricity is because a lot of the usage is not out towards anything useful but just wasted on things like generating Google Search summaries.

  • illi@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    431·
    19 days ago

    If you want to optimize a parent-child time with AI, maybe optimize it with not having children instead.

    • cman6@lemmy.worldEnglish
      111·
      19 days ago

      Exactly what I was thinking. It makes me think of the book Four Thousand Weeks, and Chasing Daylight.

      The former is about the trap of productivity and thinking you can fit more into your day than you can. Hint: no matter how much you get done in your day, you will want to try to fit in more

      And the latter I don’t want to spoil but there was a quote along the lines of “Gene looked at all his colleagues who wanted more and thought, do they know when they will have enough?”, again the idea that we will always want more.

      Reading to your child and spending time with them is enough. Forget all the other distractions the world offers you.

      /rant

      • Madzielle@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        5·
        19 days ago

        I struggled to be a proper mom when my kid was a toddler.

        One of the few things I did absolutely right, was read to him every night. It was usually the best part of my day.

        “when will they have enough”… “prodictivity” is almost appearing to be the death of human connection these days, and to that, I just say, Komorebi mother fuckers.

    • yeehaw@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      19 days ago

      Now this is the correct answer.

      Not sure what to tell those who thought they’d give it a whirl and found out it wasn’t for them, however 😅.

    • RedWeasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      19 days ago

      Politicians and governments around the world are already thinking we don’t have enough babies being born. Soon they will want to incentivize people to have children because of AI too. Just more “reasons” to justify it with the thought up ones already.

  • leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    26·
    19 days ago

    It was considered unethical when Harlow did it to monkeys, but I guess it must be fine when parents do it to their own children, regardless of the ensuing panic disorders… 🤷

  • eicker@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    242·
    20 days ago

    Big Tech spent years designing platforms that steal our attention, then sold us AI tools to compensate for the time we lost. Now apparently even spending time with your kids is inefficient. The endgame is becoming obvious: humans do the work, AI gets the attention, and Silicon Valley collects the subscription fees. Apparently being a parent is just another productivity bottleneck.

    • 🌸𝓯𝓵𝓸𝔀𝓮𝓻🌸@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      14·
      19 days ago

      Apparently being a parent is just another productivity bottleneck.

      Always has been. Women have been paid less or just fired because they want to take care of the children. Usually by the same people complaining there aren’t enough kids now.

  • nanometer1625@thelemmy.clubEnglish
    11·
    19 days ago

    His spouse reasonably complained that an audiobook wouldn’t be in his voice. But Sng wasn’t to be outdone in the zero-effort-parenting department.

    “I can train a voice model,” he countered, before addressing his readers: “Parenting hits different when you work in AI.”

    Sometimes I feel bad about myself, but at least I don’t say stuff like this.

  • ch00f@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    20 days ago

    I love when a news article just summarizes tweets. Couldn’t they at least reach out the dude to get some more background?

    • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      18 days ago

      I agree, though sometimes in retrospect after they see how they’re post lands they will retroactively claim they didn’t actually mean it. So have to take rationalizations with a grain of salt.