Civics of Technology Announcements
Next Book Club: Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires by Paris Marx on Tuesday, December 15 at 8:00 PM Eastern. Register here.
by Charles Logan
I’m a dad. I have three kids, and since my oldest was born nine years ago, I’ve learned a few things about how to care for a child. Many of those things I’ve learned by observing. I’ve watched my kids. I’ve watched close family and I’ve watched complete strangers. And I’ve watched an animated blue dog from Australia by the name of Bandit Custard Healer.
For the uninitiated, Bandit is the father of Bingo and Bluey from the children’s program Bluey. Across hours and hours of watching Bluey with my kids, I’ve learned an important lesson from Bandit: when your children invite you into their imagined worlds, follow them–and don’t only trail behind. Construct those worlds alongside your children. Like Bandit, you might transform into a clean-up robot who can’t be turned off, or you could morph into a baboon and escape the zoo. Approach everyday objects as endless possibilities for opening new portals of play. What I learned from Bandit–and, I should say, his wife Chilli–is how to closely attend to children’s wonder and silliness and return that magic with my own set of spells that serve to strengthen our unfurling stories and our family’s bonds.
I’m not here to just write a paean to Bandit. Instead, I want to contrast Bandit’s rambunctious imagination with a pernicious imagination, one that I’ve seen take root in some dads as of late.
In an emerging genre, a father shares an anecdote about sitting with his child. The two are working on a story together. Then, very quickly, the father turns to ChatGPT rather than follow the example set by Bandit. For example, Sal Khan begins his book Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (And Why That’s a Good Thing) by regaling us with the time he and his eleven-year-old daughter started to write a story and Khan put a ChatGPT interface in front of his child. More recently, Daniel Susskind starts an article by announcing that he prompted what Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna term a “synthetic text-extruding machine” to produce for his children a version of a beloved story from his childhood that he and his father never got around to writing. Aubrey Hirsch has a name for this kind of father: a “ChatGPT dad”.
For Hirsch, when a ChatGPT dad outsources his thinking to a chatbot, the consequence is more work for mother. Indeed, as Ruth Schwartz Cowan documented 43 years ago, automation often relieves men from household labor while failing to do so for women. I share Hirsch’s critique–and I want to raise another one. My fellow dads, my dudes, why are you abandoning your imagination in favor of synthetic text from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or, my god, Grok?
“[I]t matters whose imaginations get to materialize as our shared future,” writes Ruha Benjamin in her book Imagination: A Manifesto. What do the small group of men behind some of the most powerful companies in the world imagine for our shared future? In July, Sam Altman–himself a father–posted to X, “cool use case of chatgpt work i heard last night: connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests. every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.” That’s some Harry Harlow parenting right there, a wired substitute for the real presence and attention of love.
We don’t need chatbots to produce stories for and with our children. Believe me, I understand the temptation. Parenting is exhausting. It’s have to laugh or else you’ll weep and may never ever stop weeping levels of exhausting. (And, yes, even parenting in the mold of Bandit and Chilli may cause some grudges to form.) But when we relinquish our imagination to a chatbot and encourage our children to do the same, we deny the power of our imaginations–and we further empower the toxic imaginations of the men running Silicon Valley. We also, I worry, socialize our youngest children into using chatbots, the same products that have led adolescents to die by suicide. “Imagination is a field of struggle,” argues Benjamin, and now is the time to refuse the lethal imaginations of Big Tech.
As we refuse, we can continue to learn from Bandit and Chilli and another beloved character from my own childhood. Fred Rogers closed a 1999 episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood with the following message to his viewers, those young and old: “You know, your own imagination is far more wonderful than any computer could ever be. You know why? You’re a living human being, and a computer is just a machine. Human beings are far more wonderful than machines.” Now, I would quibble with Mr. Rogers that a computer is “just a machine,” since such characterizations obscure the ideological and political projects pursued through computers and computing. I also believe digital technologies can and do support human ingenuity. But like Rogers, I balk at the thought that we should degrade our own imaginations for the ease offered by a technology company.
Dads (and everybody else), I urge you to resist the siren song sold to optimize your caregiving. Stop permitting corrosive chatbots from mediating how we experience ourselves and our children. We are storytellers–you, me, and our kids–and while the waters can be choppy and skies dark, that cushion over there is a lifeboat, the baseball bat that somehow still hasn’t been put away sure looks a whole lot like a paddle, so let’s get to imagining.