Can ChatGPT make me a better dad?
Part 1
Recent advances in artificial intelligence, or AI more commonly, are exciting and have the potential to increase productivity and turbocharge economic growth. Large language models (LLMs) burst onto the scene in late 2022 and into 2023 led by ChatGPT from the engineers at OpenAI. The ability to have natural language conversations with a computer and to generate digital images through written prompts has opened many possibilities about how technology might change the human experience in the years to come.
What are some examples of what this new AI can do? Writers can train language models on their past published works and then prompt the AI to generate a new article in their voice with astonishing results. Artists can use generative art tools like DALL·E 3 to produce new works combining human creativity and machine computing power like never before. Companies can create interactive wikis using all of their enterprise “knowledge” for employees to search, query, and chat with.
All of that is great, but my question is, can ChatGPT make me a better dad? In part 1 of this series of parenting with a “copilot,” let’s see how it might help with the task of idea generation…
Deciding on a name
How does one decide on a name for a baby? Some people may choose a family name passed down through many generations of ancestors. Others may comb through hundreds or thousands of names in any number of baby naming books. Free-spirited people may even follow a simple gut feeling.
In May of 2023, I asked myself whether ChatGPT might be able to help my wife and me narrow down and curate options. So, I opened a session with the AI chat software and began writing prompts to produce a list of possible names that my wife and I could then vote on with a simple yay or nay. At the time, we needed lists for both a boy and a girl as we didn’t know the sex yet. We used some basic prompt engineering, as they call it in the biz, to get names that ended in a long “e” vowel sound.
This experiment actually worked quite well. It first returned a list of 20 names, each meeting our criteria, and after working through those, we requested 20 more. Nearly all of the results were reasonable. Only a few times did it return a name like “Fallon” which oddly didn’t meet our sound requirement. My wife and I ended up with about 5 names for girls and 5 for boys through a combination of names we liked prior to the session and ones that ChatGPT suggested. We talked through them for a few more days before ultimately choosing favorites.
In the end, ChatGPT didn’t exactly choose a name for us, but I will give it credit for helping to make the experience pretty enjoyable. I could envision an app that would help parents search for names given a number of different criteria doing quite well. Who knows, there might be some young entrepreneurs living in a small San Francisco apartment working on it right now.
I can imagine many scenarios where the idea generation support of a chatbot could be immensely beneficial. I don’t think it will be the last time I use ChatGPT in this way to help brainstorm and quickly get to a list of viable options.
Stay tuned for part 2 where I directly ask ChatGPT to help make me a better dad. Will it give me the secret to unlocking my parental potential? Find out soon…
So long for now.
-Felix