Momfluencers Are Pitching AI as a Better ‘Coparent’ Than Men

Lilian Schmidt could not, for the life of her, figure out how to get her daughter to go to sleep.

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

When her daughter was 3 and a half years old, a bleary-eyed and desperate Schmidt turned to a controversial parenting tool: ChatGPT. The advice it offered “was completely opposite from everything I’d heard before,” she says. “It said she needed more stimulation,” suggesting that her daughter chew gum or jump on a trampoline before bed.

To Schmidt’s utter shock, it worked. Within five minutes, her daughter snuggled up next to her and fell asleep. “I was freaking out,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, nobody was 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 TikTok video with the caption, “I Turned ChatGPT into my coparent,” and it went viral. Her follower count swelled to 27,000 in just three weeks. She made her own custom GPT, Coparent, and started selling access to it for $37 on her website.

Schmidt is one of a growing cohort of women branding themselves as a new type of momfluencer—not one who uses aspirational imagery to make the mundane labor associated with motherhood more aesthetically appealing, but one who asks whether the labor is even necessary at all. They post videos like “The AI Assistant That’s Basically My Mom Brain Now” and “How to Use AI as a Mom,” and promote customized prompts or handbooks to moms who “want a coparent who never forgets the sunscreen or asks you to write things down,” as Schmidt writes in one TikTok caption.

One person who is relatively absent from Schmidt’s content is her longtime partner. In her videos, she’s doing pretty much all of the parenting labor, including meal prep, grocery-shopping, and kiddie arts and crafts. This is reflective of reality; moms assume the vast majority of the physical and mental labor in US households, with a 2022 Department of Labor survey finding that employed mothers spend an extra 13.5 hours per week doing chores and an average of 12.5 hours per week on childcare—a 40 percent increase from 1975.

That’s not to say that dads aren’t helping around the house. Pew data shows that fathers now spend more than twice as much time on household chores and childcare than they did 50 years ago. But by and large, women are still expected to shoulder most of the household burden.

“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.” Moms flocked to her page once they saw she was using AI “to actually be more present with my kids and to be more emotionally regulated, so I can be a cool mom and a happy mom and not a stressed-out one.”

Women are less likely (more than 20 percent less likely, according to one 2025 study) to use generative AI in their everyday lives than men are, a discrepancy known as the “AI gender gap.” Generative AI tools suffer from what Stephanie Leblanc-Godfrey, a founder of the company Mother AI who refers to herself as a “maternal technologist,” likes to call a “PMS” problem, meaning they tend to be “pale, male, and stale.”

“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,” she says.

Erin Grau, a cofounder of the research and corporate training company Charter, speculates working mothers may use AI less due to “mom guilt”—viewing dependence on AI as a form of “cheating.”

For this reason, many prominent women in tech and media have focused on closing that gap by framing generative AI as a tool of women’s empowerment. “It has exploded. It has accelerated,” Mel Robbins, who recently announced a partnership with Microsoft Copilot, dramatically intones in an episode of The Mel Robbins Podcast from November. “I don’t want to get left behind. I don’t want women in particular to get left behind.” In April, Reese Witherspoon also went viral for an Instagram post in which she chirped about how the tech would “make our everyday lives easier and better,” prompting the Cut to bemoan “the girlbossification of AI.”

Sarah Dooley, a former tech consultant for brands like Visa, started using generative AI in 2023 to make up toothbrushing songs for her three daughters and to write notes to her babysitter. She started hosting in-person small groups for moms to teach them how to use generative AI to delegate household tasks, leading to her quitting her job and starting her brand, the AI-Empowered Mom. She now works full-time doing consulting for companies to teach women how to use AI, and has a book called The AI-Empowered Family coming out next year.

Dooley and Schmidt regularly field angry comments accusing them of promoting a technology that not only has deleterious environmental impacts, but also is positioned to put nearly 15 percent of the workforce at risk of unemployment, according to one projection. There’s also the very real risk posed by generative AI on children’s development and mental health.

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.”

I tried out some chatbot parenting myself, but just getting set up—entering lines and lines of text into the prompt field to spell out the mundanity of my everyday mom tasks—filled me with existential dread. It stressed me out to see the sheer volume of all of my quotidian household responsibilities in aggregate. It felt like AI, much like the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine, didn’t make my life as a mom more efficient, so much as it was a slightly flashier means of continuing to tether me to the home.

Frankly, it also made me angry that I still had to shoulder the majority of these responsibilities to begin with. My husband, for instance, regularly uses Claude to research the stock market, or to boost his efficiency in his job as an architect. But it would never occur to him to use it to keep track of birthday parties and doctor’s appointments.

As much as technology can help to all