Lilian Schmidt, a brand consultant from Zurich, struggled to get her daughter to sleep despite trying all traditional methods. Frustrated, she turned to ChatGPT, which suggested more stimulation before bed, such as chewing gum or jumping on a trampoline. To her surprise, it worked, and her daughter fell asleep within minutes. Schmidt’s experience led her to create a custom GPT called Coparent, which she sells for $37 on her website. Her TikTok video, captioned “I Turned ChatGPT into my coparent,” went viral, boosting her follower count to 27,000 in three weeks. She now promotes AI as a tool to help moms manage household tasks and be more present with their children. Schmidt’s content highlights the challenges of parenting, including the invisible labor women often bear, and positions AI as a way to reduce that burden. She emphasizes that while her partner helps, the majority of the work still falls on her. "It’s not that my partner isn’t helping, because he is," Schmidt says. "But for women and moms, there is so much invisible labor that you carry and everything is in your hands, and it actually takes time with your kids away from you." Women are less likely to use generative AI in their everyday lives than men, according to a 2025 study, with the gap attributed to factors like 'mom guilt' and the 'PMS' problem in AI development. "You have all these people running these AI companies that actually don’t reflect the society that’s using them, or the needs of moms, who tend to be the heads of households," says Stephanie Leblanc-Godfrey, a founder of Mother AI.
The AI momfluencers I spoke with share some of these concerns. "The way Reese Witherspoon, Mel Robbins, and others are kind of positioning AI as radical feminism—I feel like if you use women’s insecurity or AI being feminist as the entry point, you’ve kind of lost the plot," says Leblanc-Godfrey, adding, "I reject that sort of productivity porn, toxic efficiency piece of the conversation." While most momfluencers concede that the risks to the environment or the human workforce are real, those worries tend to take a backseat to framing AI literacy as a tool of liberation from household drudgery, similar to the invention of the vacuum cleaner or the washing machine in the mid-20th century. "Women already have so many reservations about using this tool," says Schmidt. "And we just don’t need another one." Still, questions remain—for instance, why is the onus on women to learn how to use AI to make their households run more efficiently, and where are the dads in all this? Schmidt says that while 95 percent of her audience is female, she does regularly receive emails from dads hoping to use AI to ease their partners’ workloads. She does, however, note that these messages are fewer and further between than those from women, and they tend to be in private DMs rather than public comments. When I ask her why she thinks this is the case, she only semi-jokingly says, "the patriarchy." "Unfortunately, mental load is still considered a female problem," she says. "A lot of men don't even know what mental load even is."
Source: wired
