It started with the simplest request in the world. A wife, a newborn baby, and four little words: read him a book. What happened next turned a San Francisco software engineer into the most debated dad on the internet.
Alvin Sng, an engineer at the AI company Factory, thought he had a clever answer when his wife asked him to read a bedtime story to their newborn. Why read it himself, he reasoned, when he could just play an audiobook from his phone? When his wife pointed out that an audiobook wouldn’t be in his voice, Sng had what he considered an even better idea: he could simply train an AI model to read bedtime stories in his own voice.
He shared the exchange on X with a punchline that would come back to haunt him: “Parenting hits different when you work in AI.”…