Justine Bateman Says Dad Should ‘Take Child to an Orphanage’ for ChatGPT Use: ‘What Are You Doing?’

Justine Bateman is not OK with parents using artificial intelligence to educate their kids.

“I saw a post by somebody that said, like, ‘You know what’s great about this? I have a kid who’s asking why, why, why on all of these things, and I just handed him my phone with ChatGPT on it,’” Bateman, 59, said on the “Better Bad Ideas” podcast on July 2. “And he said, ‘And he just talked to it for like an hour, asking all these questions. All these questions.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, just take your child to an orphanage right now because you obviously don’t want to be a parent.’ Like, I don’t know what you’re doing. What are you doing?”

Host Sean O’Brien chimed in to say that parents no longer have to read stories to their kids if they don’t want to, thanks to AI, which got Bateman riled up.

“That was another one, a parent going, like, ‘Isn’t this amazing?’ And I’m, like, ‘Dude, you have lost this story in both senses of the word. Like, you just lost it. I don’t know why you had kids if you don’t want to participate in stuff like that,’” Bateman said.

In a clip shared via Instagram on the podcast’s page, commenters both agreed and disagreed with Bateman and her thoughts on children and AI.

“She is not wrong! The best memories of raising my kids were the times spent together. Time well spent and cherished,” one commenter wrote, with another adding, “Now, of course, you should still spend quality time with your kid every day, and yes there is so much value in taking interest in your kid’s interests and participating in their development…but ChatGPT is AMAZING and many grown-ups use it to learn all kinds of things. How cool that a child who is very sponge-like can absorb info at their own command. I ❤️ it. I also love this actress, I just have to disagree with this.”

Bateman, who shares children Gianetta, 21, and Duke, 23, with husband Mark Fluent, went on to say that the use of AI in schools is “child abuse” and is preventing children from organically relying on their own intelligence.

“The fact that schools are incorporating AI is, first of all, child abuse,” the Family Ties alum stated. “I’ll tell you the physical equivalent of doing this to somebody’s brain while it’s developing — this would be the equivalent of taking an 18-month-old, not letting them learn how to walk, just put them in a wheelchair right away. Don’t let them develop the muscles in their legs. That’s the equivalent. It’s absolutely child abuse. And it’s also so self-defeating. Like, do schools want to become completely irrelevant and totally useless?”

O’Brien added that schools and universities would probably take a hit if AI takes over, to which Bateman said it will be “drilled into the foundation of all these systems and institutions.”

She continued, “Drill holes in it and then jam this foam in it — really, this generative AI. Because it allows you to get rid of some of your workforce, because it allows you to reduce your human capital overhead, which is going to widen your profit margins. That’s why it’s going to get instituted. Even though it’s fallible, it’s not as good. You know, people say, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not as good as…’ Like, you don’t understand people’s motives for incorporating it.”

Justine — the sister of fellow actor Jason Bateman — has been warning others about the pitfalls of AI for years. During the 2023 film industry strikes in Hollywood, she discussed the possibility of synthetic performers replacing actors on screen.

“If you want it to spit out a synthetic performer, which is just an AI object that resembles a human, you feed it 100 years of performances,” she told MSNBC at the time. “The unions have given them permission to replace actors with synthetic performers, which is an amalgamation of 100 years of performances, and that means fewer to no sets, fewer to no crew, fewer to no drivers, the list goes on, and that’s very bad for the business you can imagine.”

Ultimately, the agreement that resolved the SAG-AFTRA strike in November 2023 contained detailed provisions governing the creation and use of both “digital replicas” of individual performers and entirely AI-generated “synthetic performers.”