육아의 정신적, 육체적 부담을 혼자 지는 엄마들이 실질적인 육아 도우미로 생성형 AI를 활용하는 'AI 맘플루언서' 트렌드가 떠오르고 있습니다. 기존의 남성 중심 AI 생태계가 해결하지 못했던 여성과 어머니들의 실제 가사 및 육아 고충을 AI가 대신 해결해 주며, 챗GPT를 활용한 맞춤형 프롬프트와 육아 비법이 큰 인기를 끌고 있습니다.
번역된 본문
리리안 슈미트(Lilian Schmidt)는 도저히 딸을 재우는 방법을 알아낼 수 없었다. 수면 전문가나 소아과 의사가 준 어떤 조언도 통하지 않았다. 백색소음기 사용도, 암막 커튼 구매도, 마사지조차도 소용이 없었다. 취리히에 거주하는 이 브랜드 컨설턴트는 “매일 아이를 침대에 눕히는 데 2~3시간이 걸렸다”며 “아이는 울부짖고 저항했고, 하루가 끝나면 온 가족이 너무 지치고 좌절스러웠다”고 회상했다. 딸이 세 살 반였던 때, 눈이 충혈되고 절망에 빠진 슈미트는 논란의 여지가 있는 육아 도구인 챗GPT(ChatGPT)에 의지했다. 챗GPT가 제시한 조언은 “내가 전에 들었던 모든 것과 완전히 정반대”였다고 그녀는 말한다. “아이에게 더 많은 자극이 필요하다”며 자기 전에 딸에게 껌을 씹게 하거나 트램펄린에서 뛰어놀게 하라고 제안한 것이다. 슈미트를 완전히 놀라게 한 것은, 이 방법이 통했다는 것이다. 단 5분 만에 딸은 그녀에게 안기며 잠이 들었다. 그녀는 “너무 놀라 벌어진 일 같았다. 세상에, 챗GPT 말고는 나를 도울 수 있는 사람이 아무도 없었다”고 말했다. 14살 된 의붓아들도 있는 슈미트는 이 일을 계기로 일종의 AI 전도사가 되었다. 2025년 6월, 그녀는 “챗GPT를 나의 육아 파트너(Coparent)로 만들었다”는 캡션이 달린 틱톡 영상을 올렸고, 이는 엄청난 바이럴을 기록했다. 단 3주 만에 그녀의 팔로워 수는 2만 7천 명으로 늘어났다. 그녀는 자체 맞춤형 GPT인 '코페어런트(Coparent)'를 만들어 자신의 웹사이트에서 37달러에 접근 권한을 판매하기 시작했다.
슈미트는 스스로를 새로운 유형의 '맘플루언서(엄마 인플루언서)'로 포지셔닝하는 점점 늘어나는 여성들 중 한 명이다. 이들은 육아와 관련된 평범한 노동을 미학적으로 더 매력적으로 보이게 하기 위해 완벽하고 동경받는 이미지를 사용하는 것이 아니라, 그 노동이 과연 필수적인 것인지 질문을 던진다. 이들은 “이제는 내 엄마 뇌나 다름없는 AI 비서”나 “엄마로서 AI를 사용하는 방법”과 같은 영상을 게시하고, 썬크림을 바르는 것을 절대 잊지 않고 메모를 요구하지 않는 육아 파트너를 원하는 엄마들을 위해 맞춤형 프롬프트나 매뉴얼을 홍보한다.
슈미트의 콘텐츠에서 상대적으로 모습을 찾아보기 힘든 사람은 오랜 기간 함께한 그녀의 파트너다. 영상 속에서 그녀는 식사 준비, 장보기, 아이 미술 놀이 등 육아 노동의 거의 전부를 혼자 감당하고 있다. 이는 현실을 반영한다. 미국 가정에서 엄마들은 육체적, 정신적 노동의 대부분을 떠안고 있다. 2022년 미국 노동부 조사에 따르면 직장을 가진 어머니들은 매주 평균 13.5시간을 더 가사 노동에 쓰고 평균 12.5시간을 육아에 쓰며, 이는 1975년에 비해 40% 증가한 수치다. 그렇다고 아빠들이 가사를 돕지 않는다는 것은 아니다. 퓨(Pew) 리서치 센터 데이터에 따르면 오늘날 아빠들은 50년 전보다 가사와 육아에 두 배 이상 많은 시간을 쓰고 있다. 하지만 대체로 여전히 가사 부담의 대부분은 여성이 지는 것이 기대된다. 슈미트는 “내 파트너가 돕지 않는다는 것이 아니다. 그는 돕고 있다”면서도 “여성과 엄마들에게는 감당해야 할 보이지 않는 노동이 너무 많고 모든 것이 내 손에 달려 있어, 실제로 아이들과 보낼 시간을 빼앗긴다”고 말했다. 엄마들은 그녀가 AI를 사용하여 “실제로 아이들과 더 온전히 함께하고 감정을 잘 통제하여, 스트레스받는 엄마가 아니라 멋지고 행복한 엄마가 될 수 있다”는 것을 보고 그녀의 페이지로 몰려들었다.
한 2025년 연구에 따르면, 여성은 남성보다 일상생활에서 생성형 AI를 사용할 확률이 20% 이상 낮으며, 이러한 격차는 'AI 성별 격차(AI gender gap)'로 알려져 있다. 생성형 AI 도구들은 자신을 '모성적 기술자'라고 소개하는 기업 '마더 AI(Mother AI)'의 설립자 스테파니 르블랑-갓프리(Stephanie Leblanc-Godfrey)가 이른바 'PMS' 문제를 겪고 있다고 말한다. 즉, 이 도구들을 만드는 사람들이 대체로 '백인(Pale), 남성(Male), 구식(Stale)'이라는 것이다. 그녀는 “AI 기업을 운영하는 수많은 사람들은 사실 이를 사용하는 사회나, 대개 가정의 실질적인 가장인 엄마들의 필요를 제대로 반영하지 못한다”고 지적했다. 연구 및 기업 교육 회사인 차터(Charter)의 공동 창립자 에린 그라우(Erin Grau)는 직장을 가진 어머니들이...
Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story 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 p