Behold the final boss of tech-brained overprotective dads. Worried about his son talking to strangers on Roblox, he used AI to create a clone of the game so he could construct a false reality where all the players his son talks to are AI — without telling the poor kid.
“I vibecoded a safer Roblox for my son,” began the dad, Adam Lyttle, in a now viral post on X. “The game is populated with recordings of other play throughs (giving the illusion of playing with others).”
“And there’s even a chat from the bots talking to each other,” Lyttle explained. “He can talk with the bots and they chat back using ChatGPT.”
Lyttle’s post was met with swift backlash, with many raising the obvious trust issues this could cause in his young child — or the simple fact that this was overkill when you could implement stronger parental controls, or just have the kid play a different game, instead.
One blasted Lyttle for “willingly putting your own [child] into an AI generated simulation and lying to them about it.” More than a few compared this to “The Truman Show,” a 1998 movie about a man who doesn’t realize that his entire life is an elaborate fiction made for a TV show, with all his friends and family played by actors.
“This is dystopian and incredibly depressing,” wrote another.
The vibe-coded Roblox clone goes to extraordinary lengths to fake a multiplayer experience. In footage Lyttle uploaded, you can see the other “players” attempt to navigate the in-game obstacles. The chat is also popping off like an actual multiplayer lobby. “im playing on my school chromebook rn,” says “TurboNoah,” one of the AI puppets.
As Lyttle continued to get brutally ratioed, he resorted to a classic defense strategy: it was just a prank, bro.
“The tweet was perfectly constructed to be just ragey enough to drive engagement,” he claimed, adding he “honestly didn’t think it would work.”
It’s another example of the weird obsession that some parents have about using AI to raise their kids. Some leave it at letting their kid talk to a chatbot for hours on end, but others go much further.
None other than OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has admitted that he relies on ChatGPT to raise his son, recently becoming X’s main character for the day after suggesting that parents should use AI to generate personalized podcasts that talk about their kid’s day and their interests. Another dad on X said he secretly recorded his toddler’s conversations and fed them into an AI model to create a webpage dissecting everything they said.
While you can understand Lyttle wanting to protect his kid from weirdos online, there’s about a million different ways he could’ve gone about it that didn’t involve walling him into a juvenile panopticon. “Coulda just let the kid play Mario instead of putting him in the ‘Truman Show,'” one commenter sagely observed.