She Turned Her Whole Life Into Training Data—For an AI Baby

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. Dan Shipper sits down with Sarah Rose Siskind, a science comedy writer and the founder of communications agency HelloSciCom, to talk about how to use AI as a creative tool. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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Comedy writer Sarah Rose Siskind has two buns in the oven. One is very literally her unborn child, due to join us on this side of the womb imminently. The other is FetusGPT—an LLM trained on MP3s and text files of Siskind’s daily conversations and interactions from the time she was five months pregnant.

This elite corpus of erudition includes Seinfeld episodes, YouTube videos about lemurs, discussions between Siskind and her partner about chores, and eight hours of snoring per night. Just like any child picking up language only from what it’s exposed to, FetusGPT’s initial outputs are still gibberish. If she swears, it picks that up too.

With FetusGPT, Sarah is trying to run a rough one-to-one comparison: how natural intelligence—her unborn child—develops alongside AI trained on the same narrow slice of her daily world. It’s one zany example of how Siskind uses humor to make a bigger point. “AI is what we make [of] it, just like children” she told Dan. It’s an approach that feeds through her comedy writing and work as the founder of science and technology communications agency Hello SciCom.