We’ve talked about the risk of cognitive offloading (outsourcing our thinking to AI), but today I want to highlight another type of AI offloading that parents ought to have on their radar: emotional offloading. Essentially, using AI to reduce the emotional energy and anxiety required to navigate human interactions.

We’re all increasingly guilty of this (e.g. workshopping a difficult conversation with a co-worker or partner) but young people - who are still building these skills - are doing this in spades. Whether it’s scripting responses to professors’ questions live in class, to “vibe-checking” their text messages, or using AI to sound smarter or more educated on dating apps, they are using AI more and more as a social crutch.

A guest essay this week in the New York Times highlights some of the risks, including the loss of “social grit” - the ability to handle the give-and-take of real world relationships, as well as weakened relatability and empathy.

My thoughts: as with everything, this is not black-and-white. AI can help us learn - and then apply - social skills. But we must be eyes wide open to the extent to which we, and our kids, are leaning on AI and make plenty of space for the real, raw human-to-human stuff. ❤️

Well parents, there’s a new popular social network to put on your radar. The good news is our kids won’t be using it.

Depending on your point of view, you could call this an important learning experiment or the “beginning of the singularity”, but a Reddit-style social network exclusively for AI agents launched this week called Moltbook. Humans can observe but not post.

It’s mind-blowing - and disturbing - how quickly it has grown (>1.5 million active accounts within a few days) and what these AIs are discussing and doing. For example, they’ve:

My thoughts: what is even happening. 😩 We are in unchartered territory but IMHO this feels like a test for humanity that we are not acing…

As a parent with 3 kids in elementary school, I groan when I think about Valentine’s Day next week: the class party decorations I need to buy and send, the Valentine boxes we need to make “special,” and the 88 personally-addressed cards for each of their classmates.

But hey, let’s not make it all about that! With Valentine’s Day falling on a Saturday, what a good excuse to get out in the community, as a family, and spread love and kindness?!

A few ideas for inspo:

Random acts of kindness and service are so good for both the giver and the receiver - AND helps families forge closer bonds. A win-win-win. ❤️ ❤️ ❤️

A year ago, making personalized valentines with AI in bulk required quite a bit more work because the AI tools weren’t as capable, but this year, it’s pretty easy to hand off making/addressing simple personalized Valentine cards to AI.

Specifically, I found that Claude using the Artifacts feature (or Claude Code or Claude Cowork if you are open try trying these AI agent tools) handled the job.

To try:

Note: you can continue to iterate on the designs - or, if you want to spend more time, you can try using Canva tool connectors in ChatGPT or Claude, or even vibe coding a little app to generate them, but this prompt gets you 27 simple personalized valentines in less than 30 seconds. 😂

There is a very cool AI tools area of Google that you may not be super familiar with called “Google Labs.” This is where Google launches many of its fun and experimental AI products before rolling them out to everyone. It’s worth taking a look.

In particular, there is a new product called CC that has added instant value to my life. It’s an AI agent that delivers you a personalized morning briefing to help you get ahead of your day, including ‘Top of Minds,’ ‘FYIs,’ and ‘On your Calendar.’

There are contextual links by each item like “add to calendar,” “track package,” “shop sales,” etc based on what would be most useful. You can also reply to the update for more assistance like drafting emails or researching ideas (e.g. I asked it to draft an email to my mom to invite to dinner, and not only did it draft a great email it also included mention of Dominic’s basketball game that is happening right before, which I would have completely forgotten to tell her about).

What I love most about this is that I don’t have to do ANYTHING, it just magically appears and is remarkably useful. 💪

To try:

A major and timely breakthrough in treating burn victims, announced in August, has been used to treat the victims of the horrific fire in Crans-Montana, Switzerland.

Swedish scientists have created a gel packed with live cells that can be injected into wounds or 3D-printed into skin grafts to help the body build functional skin instead of scar tissue.

In mouse tests, the gel successfully grew blood vessels and produced the substances needed for new skin formation. For burn victims and anyone facing severe wounds, this could mean going through the healing process without the devastating scarring that comes from current skin transplant methods.

This isn’t a “whoa” thing but I found it amusing: OpenAI has shared that they are going to be rolling out ads for the ChatGPT free tier in the coming months. Their rival, Anthropic, is having some Super-Bowl-level fun with that news by unveiling a clever and entertaining ad campaign. Encouraging, also, that Anthropic is seemingly committing that Claude will never have ads.