San Francisco software engineer called ‘horrible father’ after he jokes about using AI to read bedtime stories to his newborn

An attempt at tech humor by a Silicon Valley engineer has sparked widespread online backlash, after a software engineer joked about training an artificial intelligence (AI) voice model to read bedtime stories to his newborn child instead of doing it himself. Alvin Sng, a software engineer at the San Francisco-based AI research lab Factory, shared an exchange between himself and his wife on X (formerly Twitter) that quickly went viral for all the wrong reasons.