Header Image Source: Hwawon Ceci Lee // Anadolu via Getty Images
Sam Altman can’t imagine trying to raise a child without using AI, so he told Jimmy Fallon on a recent edition of The Tonight Show. The episode was yet another instance of Fallon, the Randall Weems of the talk-show world, sucking up to power and questionable business decisions under the guise of his guileless laugh-bot persona. Remember when he showed off his NFTs to Paris Hilton, or have you too yet to recover from the cringe attack it induced? During his conversation with Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (and a man being sued by his own sister for sexual assault), you could see the light leave his eyes as it became clear that his interviewee was serious about needing AI to raise a child. Hey, ChatGPT, my baby is crying and asking for its opinions on Bitcoin isn’t helping. What should I do?
Jimmy Fallon: “And do you use ChatGPT when raising your baby?” Sam Altman: “I cannot imagine figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT.”
[image or embed] — More Perfect Union (
@moreperfectunion.bsky.social) December 9, 2025 at 3:01 PM
The nightmare of this flop-sweaty attempt at a charm offensive dropped shortly before Time declared the ‘architects of AI’ to be the persons of 2025. The magazine illustrated the likes of Altman, Google’s AI lab lead Sir Demis Hassabis, computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, and, of course, Elon Musk in place of the nameless skyscraper builders depicted in one of the most famous photographs in history. It seemed a tad too on the nose that the pioneers of a giant plagiarism machine built off the backs of overworked coders and uncredited labour would be styled as such for the cover: after all, taking credit for someone else’s achievements is kind of the point of generative AI in its current form, right?
‘The Architects of AI’ have been named Person of the Year by TIME.
[image or embed] — Pop Base (
@popbase.tv) December 11, 2025 at 2:10 PM
AI is inevitable. That’s what we keep hearing, whether it’s from this Time article or Altman’s interviews or the endless cycle of slop and industry panic that has invested untold billions into a suspect technology with no hope of profit in sight. The genie is out of the bottle and all you chumps will just have to deal with it. As job losses mount, artists scream into the void about their work being stolen to train these models, and kids and isolated people sink further into depression and even suicide thanks to chatbot addictions. ChatGPT makes you more miserable but hey, at least it occasionally gets your details right when you ask it a basic question. So, how do you sell such a falsehood to the masses, especially as many of them find themselves impacted negatively by its expansion?
Making this nightmare all the harder is the fact that the faces of this tech are all gormless losers with the attitude of spoiled toddlers who have no idea how to communicate with normal people. Elon is so far down the rabbit hole of ineptitude and ego that it’s amazing he’s able to leave the house on his own without having his address pinned to his too-tight shirt. Mark Zuckerberg’s once-understandable awkwardness now reads as active sociopathy as Facebook kowtows to Trumpian demands, and a new haircut and martial arts lessons didn’t make him any less contemptible.
Sam Altman is somewhat new to this cycle but is hilariously unprepared for it. He can’t fake being fun or relatable, because like most unnervingly rich people, he has no connection to the issues most of us worry about. When you have enough money to make all your problems go away, you start to believe that your niche concerns are a universal problem. Moreover, you believe your problems are just that much more difficult than the lowly working classes. It’s why Gwyneth Paltrow has to act like woo-woo quackery is an elite form of healthcare for her fragile form rather than a scam with good marketing. Tech bros are especially guilty of this phenomenon, only with an added slice of science-fiction self-delusion.
Side note: Have you ever noticed how these guys choose the dumbest causes to invest in? Elon Musk could easily cure world hunger with his obscene wealth but instead he obsesses over colonizing Mars, because the tech-bro mindset is obsessed with spinning their vanity as altruism. They claim their endeavours are about helping humanity in the long-term but they’re almost always built on exacerbating issues affecting the majority of us in the here and now. What good is your Mars voyage when your AI bot requires data centres that suck up most of our water supply?
It’s no wonder the AI evangelists of Silicon Valley are so uncharismatic and unconvincing in their sales pitch. Their technology relies on fostering incuriosity above all else. Every ad for AI I’ve encountered has depended on the notion that you, the potential customer base, are both stupid and lazy. I keep getting the same cycle of ads related to Google’s AI programme, and they all try to pretend that asking the most basic questions are revolutionary acts only the plagiarism machine can handle. Oh, you want to cook a nice meal for your date? Have you tried pasta? Wow, what a concept, and you, you f*cking dumb-dumb, never would have come up with that on your own, right? There’s no way to really dress that up as revolutionary.
The product is faulty and cannot be fixed in its desired form. No amount of money or mandatory engagement will fix the fact that this is a giant money hole built on theft, lies, and the rapid ensh*ttification of all modern technology that Cory Doctorow savvily called out as the desired business model for CEOs everywhere. The only hope they have of making any cash from it is to make the product even worse, be it through integrating ads onto platforms like ChatGPT (yes, your baby is possibly ill, but have you tried Pampers and Tylenol?!) or paid models there’s no mass audience for. These AI evangelists are, as Ted Chiang savvily noted, trying to get us to lower our expectations, to accept the faultiness and sloppy output of these overpriced contraptions so that we keep plugging our data into it. It’ll get better eventually, we promise, and then you’ll be so excited to use it for everything! Just put up with a few more years of regurgitated hate speech, art theft, and deepfake revenge images of your loved ones.
Altman does vaguely better with softball panels and interviews among peers who have bought into the propaganda, or at least have as many investments in the product as he does. But it’s all so reliant on the same repeated falsehood — AI is inevitable – and they all suck at selling it. Maybe Altman really does need ChatGPT to tell him how to parent, but it doesn’t seem believable, regardless of how earnestly he tries to convince Jimmy Fallon. Then again, do they even need to sell it when every corporate giant has forced it onto us against our will? Perhaps Altman and company just want people to like them. Ha. Nope. That’s what the money’s for, dudes.
