Sam Altman isn’t ordinarily high on the list of men with the power to derail my love life (he is, after all, a man who ate so few vegetables while building his first start-up that he contracted scurvy) but recently my relationship was brought to its knees by Altman. Or rather by ChatGPT, the large language model which Altman’s company, OpenAI, has developed and which my boyfriend has (without my knowledge and against my will) been using to generate names for our child.
Unless you hail from a long line of Roman numeral types (Henry Tarquin III etc), naming your child can be a fraught business. According to a Mumsnet survey, nearly a fifth of UK parents would choose a different name for their child if they could — and it can feel like every option is blighted by some unflattering celebrity affiliation or other. But the thought of looking a future child in the eye and admitting, when they ask how we picked their name, that mummy and daddy asked ChatGPT, left me cold.
