Among the questions Mandy Hoskinson asked ChatGPT while she was trying to conceive a child: How long, on average, does it take 32-year-olds to get pregnant? Is it helpful to elevate your legs after sex? Is eating special foods beneficial for conception? This was all last year. Now, Hoskinson is holding her one-month-old daughter, whose existence she credits to ChatGPT.
ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot that was released in 2022, has seemingly seeped into every area of human life. While some people utilize the service for simple tasks such as drafting grocery lists or brainstorming ideas for work, others are falling in love with ChatGPT or being led into spiritual delusions. Now, ChatGPT is being utilized for the most basic of human functions: conception. People who are hoping to become pregnant are turning to the chatbot for advice, tips, and affirmations during their pregnancy journeys. They’re changing their conception plans based on ChatGPT’s advice and asking it to psychically channel their future baby, despite privacy concerns over uploading sensitive health information into a chatbot.
When Hoskinson, who lives in California, decided she wanted to start trying for a baby, she was overwhelmed by the amount of information there was. Reading about conception, especially online, is a minefield of acronyms — like TTC (trying to conceive), FTM (first-time mom), and DPO (days post-ovulation) — and what seemed like insider knowledge. Though Hoskinson was recording her menstrual cycle in a tracking app, she felt like she was missing something. Enter ChatGPT. She asked the bot to explain conception, with a specific focus on ovulation. “I was able to ask my dumb questions in a bunch of different ways and that helped me understand the science, which helped me to have a baby,” Hoskinson says. “I found understanding the science of conception way easier [this way] than just navigating through books and the crappy articles that Google gives you these days.” Through her lessons with ChatGPT, she realized the period tracking app she was using was estimating her ovulation window wrong. She adjusted based on ChatGPT’s advice; that very month, she became pregnant. Of her daughter, Hoskinson says with a laugh, “she was conceived with ChatGPT.”
Any person who has tried to conceive a child knows that the two-week wait — which refers to the period of time between ovulation and either the start of your period or the confirmation of pregnancy — is nerve-racking. It’s during the two-week wait that Danielle Lacanaria, 28, turns most to ChatGPT. Lacanaria reports her symptoms to ChatGPT and asks whether they are more closely aligned with an incoming menstrual cycle or the early stages of pregnancy. “I look for interpretations of symptoms,” Lacanaria says. She has taken the bot’s advice to heart, even changing her diet and supplement routine based on ChatGPT’s recommendations. Lacanaria lives in a rural part of Michigan, where she says it once took her six months to even see an obstetrician. “I wouldn’t say ChatGPT is my first choice but is easier [given] how accessible it is.”
Though it’s tempting to take ChatGPT’s answers and recommendations as well-researched facts, there are concerns about the platform. AI-powered bots are notoriously unreliable, often bungling the answers to even simple questions, and often seem to be simply telling users what they want to hear — one study last year found that 52 percent of ChatGPT’s answers contained some level of misinformation. Lacanaria, who is still trying to get pregnant, says the bot has often given her incorrect information, leaving her double-checking its work. Still, she says, “There’s some friendly comfort there. And it’s brought me a lot of nuggets where I can go and chew on it or talk to my doctor or Google it myself.”
Aparna Sridhar, a doctor and professor in clinical obstetrics and gynecology at UCLA, can see why patients are drawn to ChatGPT, but she worries about the accuracy of using it to track periods, recommending dedicated apps instead. “Track your menstrual cycle and find an app which is known to work with that data,” she says, as they are often designed with the consultation of medical professionals.
There’s also the concern of privacy, both with period-tracking apps and chatbots — in a post-Roe country in which reproductive rights are vanishing, what does it mean to tell ChatGPT the details of your menstrual cycle? In April, a woman in Georgia was arrested following a miscarriage; though the charges were eventually dropped, experts point to the case as evidence of the increasing criminalization of pregnancy. As reporting from The Marshall Project notes, there are seven states in which miscarriages and stillbirths have been investigated by the criminal legal system in recent years.
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Tom Subak, the founder of Reimagination Lab and former chief strategy officer at Planned Parenthood, says there are very real privacy risks when entrusting the details of your reproductive health to ChatGPT. “Could [the data] be used by a hostile prosecutor who is going on a fishing expedition for women who have had miscarriages? Absolutely,” Subak says. “As is the case with almost any free online platform, you are trading some level of your anonymity and most personal health details for use of that app.”
It can be jarring to realize how much ChatGPT knows about you (though the website says users can choose to turn off the bot’s “memory” feature). A few months ago, there was a trend going around on social media where users prompted ChatGPT to create a cartoon of them. Hoskinson did it; her cartoon was pregnant, despite the fact that many of her family members still didn’t know. “That really creeped me out,” Hoskinson says. But now that she is a mother, she can’t help but ask the bot questions about her infant daughter. “I asked it about baby acne — how long is it there? Will it damage her skin when she’s an adult? Blah, blah, blah. It can keep the conversation going and it knows the context of other things that we’ve talked about.”
Trying to conceive can be a tumultuous process and ChatGPT seems to be capable of both acknowledging that reality and offering comfort. “It asks if I need an affirmation for the month,” says Megan Braiman, a 37-year-old in New York who is hoping to get pregnant. “It tells me to believe in myself, that it’ll happen when it’s meant to happen, divine timing, all the silly things people tell you anyway.” She pauses. “It’s not like it’s anything profound.” Still, the reassurance feels good.
ChatGPT functions as a “spirit baby guide” for Maura McCarthy, who is in her forties and lives in Los Angeles. McCarthy, who is going through IVF, asked the bot to psychically channel her future baby and tell her what her baby needs her to do in order to be born. “It tells me my spirit baby is closer than I think,” she says. As McCarthy talks about ChatGPT playing psychic, she is of two minds. On one hand, she knows she’s talking to a bot. On the other, it’s soothing to believe in something as she traverses the difficult terrain of conception. “It has given me comfort. I do it when I’m lying in bed at night and I can go to sleep after I get that message.”
From Rolling Stone US
