Parents are increasingly relying on AI for parenting issues - sometimes with dangerous levels of trust

Parents often don't know what to do next. Very often, actually. Me too. Why does the second-born have stomach pains again? Why doesn't the sister stop whining? How do I control the prepubescent stubbornness of ten-year-olds?! And this is exactly where the treacherous temptation that AI language models like ChatGPT exert on people with children lies. I have no idea? No problem. Chatty always has an answer.

Artificial intelligence has long been part of most families. A Pronova survey in June showed that 58 percent of the parents surveyed had already asked an AI specific questions about parenting - particularly often parents with children under the age of six. The level of trust (or exhaustion/overwhelm) is high: two thirds of those surveyed only sometimes or never checked the answers generated. These are numbers that scare me. Because, as you quickly notice, AI models draw on a variety of sources, not all of them reputable, and sometimes tell the most wonderful nonsense, and do so with great conviction. But at the same time there is the anxious question: Am I actually doing the same thing as most parents?