Training AI with the Right Values: Lessons from Raising Kids and Building Teams

AI Learns the Way People Do—Flawed, Fast, and Forever
Anyone who’s raised kids—or even led a team—knows this: people don’t just learn what you teach.
They learn what you model. What you tolerate. What you reward without even realizing.

Training AI feels the same.
At first, we thought we were just feeding it data. But in truth, we’re feeding it values—whether we mean to or not.

You Can’t Outsource Values
When we onboard new team members, we don’t just give them tasks—we try to give them judgment.
We explain the “why,” not just the “how.”
We set boundaries. We watch for signals. We nudge them toward choices that align with how we work—and who we are.

It takes time. It’s not perfect.
But we invest because it matters.

Now, with AI, there’s this urge to shortcut all of that.
Feed the algorithm. Press optimize. Scale fast.
But just like with people—if you skip the values part, you’ll pay for it later.

Kids Repeat What You Don’t Realize You Said
I remember once, one of my boys repeated a phrase I didn’t even know I’d said out loud.
It wasn’t inappropriate—it was just a tone. A bit too sharp. A bit too impatient.
He had absorbed it like a sponge.

And it hit me: AI does that too.

It doesn’t just pick up logic.
It picks up patterns—biases, shortcuts, unintended signals—buried deep in the data.

We train AI systems to maximize engagement, and then wonder why they chase attention instead of truth.
We ask them to “optimize” customer service, and then act surprised when they cut the human out of the loop.

The values we skip become the behaviors we regret.

The Real Responsibility Isn’t Technical—It’s Leadership
The more I work with AI teams, the more I realize:
Training models isn’t just a technical task. It’s a leadership one.

Just like building culture inside a company, it’s about deciding what’s worth slowing down for.
It’s about hard-coding empathy when the instinct is speed.
It’s about choosing feedback loops that reward long-term thinking, not just short-term wins.

Because if AI is going to shape the future of how we work, buy, hire, and live—then we need to be more than just engineers.

We need to be parents.
We need to be mentors.
We need to be the version of leadership we want it to learn from.

Regards,
Rupesh

P.S.
If you’re someone building AI tools—and thinking deeply about not just what they do, but how they do it—reach out.
We’re not just looking for output. We’re looking for the kind of builders who care about what gets absorbed between the lines.