Influential mothers tout AI as a better ‘partner’ than men

Lillian Schmidt can She had never in her life figured out how to get her daughter to sleep.

None of the advice given to her by sleep experts or her pediatrician, such as not using a white noise machine, buying blackout curtains, or even giving her a massage, worked. “Every day, it would take two to three hours to put her to bed,” recalls the brand consultant from Zurich. “She would scream and fight, and we would all be so exhausted and frustrated by the end of the day.”

When her daughter was 3 1/2 years old, a desperate, teary-eyed Schmidt turned to a controversial parenting tool: ChatGPT. The advice she was given, she says, “was completely contradictory to everything I had ever heard before.” “They said she needed more stimulation,” and she suggested her daughter chew gum or jump on the trampoline before bed.

To Schmidt’s utter shock, it worked. Within five minutes, she cuddled her daughter next to her and fell asleep. “I was feeling afraid,” she says. “I thought: Oh my God, no one has been able to help me except ChatGPT.”

From there, Schmidt, who also has a 14-year-old stepson, became something of an AI evangelist. In June 2025, she posted a video on TikTok with the caption: “I turned ChatGPT into my co-parent,” and it went viral. Her follower count swelled to 27,000 in just three weeks. It made its own GPT, Coparent, and began selling access to it for $37 on its website.

Schmidt is one of a growing group of women who describe themselves as a new kind of mom influencer — not one who uses aspirational imagery to make the mundane work of motherhood more aesthetically appealing, but one who questions whether the work is even necessary at all. They post videos like “The AI ​​Assistant That’s Basically My Mom’s Brain Now” and “How to Use AI as a Mom,” and promote prompts or booklets specifically for moms who “want a partner who never forgets sunscreen or asks you to write things down,” Schmidt wrote in one TikTok comment.

One person relatively absent from Schmidt’s content is her longtime partner. In her videos, she does almost all of the parenting work, including meal prep, grocery shopping, and kids’ arts and crafts. This reflects reality. Mothers shoulder the vast majority of the physical and mental labor in American families, with a 2022 Department of Labor survey finding that working mothers spend an additional 13.5 hours per week doing housework and an average of 12.5 hours per week caring for children — a 40 percent increase from 1975.

This does not mean that parents it’s not Help around the house. Pew data shows that parents now spend more than twice as much time on housework and child care as they did 50 years ago. But in general, women are still expected to bear most of the household burdens.

“It’s not that my partner doesn’t help me, because he does,” Schmidt says. “But for women and mothers, there is a lot of invisible work that you put on and it’s all in your hands, and it takes time away from your children.” Moms flocked to her page when they saw she was using AI “to be more present with my kids and be more emotionally regulated, so I can be a great mom and a happy mom and not a stressed mom.”

Women are less likely (more than 20% less likely, according to a 2025 study) to use generative AI in their daily lives than men, a discrepancy known as the “AI gender gap.” Obstetric AI tools suffer from what Stephanie LeBlanc Godfrey, the founder of Mother AI who refers to herself as a “maternity technologist,” likes to call the “PMS” problem, meaning they tend to be “pale, male, and old.”