Naming your child isn’t a task to be taken lightly. It’s a crucial step in the child-rearing process that could fundamentally shape a child’s identity, influence first impressions, and reflect the parents’ heritage and values.
That hasn’t stopped some from taking some baffling technological shortcuts. As the Baltimore Sun reports, one couple — and doubtless countless more — used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to name their firstborn son.
“We were looking up on ChatGPT boy names that go well with the last name Winkler,” Sarah and Stephen Winkler told the publication. “And then once we found Hudson Winkler, we’re like, ‘give us a good middle name.’”
The resulting baby ended up with a name that sounds like a grey millennial porridge: Hudson Oakley Winkler.
The choice to use an AI model for that particular purpose was immediately met with outrage online, highlighting a fierce debate over using the technology as a crutch to avoid hard decisions.
“What amazes me is how quickly people are losing either the confidence or the willingness to complete basic human tasks,” author and NPR podcast host Linda Holmes wrote in a post on Bluesky.
“It’s all so gross,” another user wrote. “I keep trying to relate to this, and I just can’t.” Others poked fun at the name “Oakley,” a name closely associated with a popular brand of sunglasses.
The main gripe: not that any name is intrinsically bad, but that the process of interacting with another human to devise one is an important part of parenthood.
“With naming kids, talking it out with your partner is fun!” author Lauren Morrill argued. “You get to share stories about why this name is good, but that name is out! So much of AI is meant to keep us from just talking to each other.”
The incident highlights how commonplace the use of AI has become just over the past three years since ChatGPT was first made available to the public. Thanks to its prowess in generating limitless amounts of text, the tool has been used to write not only essays and assignments, but also scripts for far more personal circumstances as well, such as obituaries for recently deceased loved ones or flirtations with strangers on dating apps.
A paper released by OpenAI in September found that the proportion of people using ChatGPT for personal use had risen considerably since the tool first launched in late 2022. As of July this past year, around 70 percent of ChatGPT consumer queries were “unrelated to work,” suggesting the tool is increasingly being used as an assistant in everyday life.
The rise of tools like ChatGPT has sparked a debate over whether we’ve become too dependent on these tools in both our professional and personal lives. Experts argue it’s a slippery slope.
“[Large language models] are specifically built to be conversational masters,” AI ethicist James Wilson told TechRadar in June. “Combine that with our natural tendency to anthropomorphize everything, and it makes building unhealthy relationships with chatbots like ChatGPT all too easy.”
In extreme cases, we’ve already seen a strong emotional attachment to AI chatbots being linked to a series of teen suicides, with surviving parents suing OpenAI and competing AI companies as a result.
This perceived overreliance on the tech has also inspired a passionate countermovement, as the latest reactions to the Winklers naming their son with ChatGPT go to show. As the lines between human expression and content generated by an AI model continue to blur, many say they’ve had enough, arguing that we’re losing something innate to the human experience.
“Offloading something as sentimental as naming your child to a glorified chatbot is representative of the era of rewarmed s*** we live in,” one user mourned on Bluesky.
More on OpenAI: People Are Becoming Obsessed with ChatGPT and Spiraling Into Severe Delusions
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