Need a baby name? Some parents are turning to ChatGPT for inspiration.

Naming a baby is difficult. For $500, Colleen Slagen will make it easier. Slagen, a 36-year-old name consultant based in Austin, Texas, offers premium consultations to clients, which include a video call, feedback on your list of names, a curated list of 10 names with commentary and information on their popularity and a long list of honorable mention names. (Slagen also offers an $85 service for people looking for her help choosing between names.) On TikTok, Slagen shares her insights with her 73,000 followers.

Her name consultations take her hours to complete, she tells Yahoo. “I ask [clients] a bunch of questions to home in on what they’re looking for, their criteria. Then I create a consultation document for them with ideas and explanations. We talk about popularity, style, and then go from there."

Lately, some of Slagen’s clients have told her that before booking a consultation, they turned to ChatGPT, the generative AI service. If a user prompts ChatGPT to give them a list of baby names, the app can return ideas in seconds — and for free, as compared with Slagen’s pricey consultations. But when her clients talk about ChatGPT, it’s usually because it didn’t work for them. “It’s a very fun tool … but it’s impersonal,” she says. “ChatGPT lacks trust, and people are wanting to work with somebody they trust. Some people do want creative ideas from me, but a lot of people really just want feedback and a face-to-face conversation with someone.”

For modern-day parents, the pressure to name a child can feel suffocating. There’s pressure to be original but not too unique. You want a name that people recognize but not one that’s overly common. And the permanence of the decision weighs on parents, Slagen says, which ChatGPT can’t help with. “Getting feedback from a computer doesn’t necessarily alleviate that feeling,” she says. “You want a real person’s opinion.” Slagen understands that not everyone wants to book an $85 or $500 name consultation; for people who are looking for a different path to their dream baby name, she suggests old-fashioned baby name books.

To test out ChatGPT’s naming capabilities, I entered a prompt asking the service to give me girl names that aren’t too popular. It returned within seconds with 24 names across four different categories. There were “nature-inspired” names like Marigold and Clover, “literary or vintage vibes” like Isolde and Odette, “whimsical & soft” names like Seren and Elowen and “international gems” like Anouk and Saskia. I responded by asking for names that specifically start with A and was given 25 names, including Alma, Ayla and Ariadne. For what it’s worth: None of the names that were suggested by ChatGPT registered as options I would genuinely consider using.

When Phoebee Linford, a 30-year-old mother in Utah, was pregnant, she and her husband knew their son’s first name would be Matthew but couldn’t decide on a middle name. At one point, Linford was sure they would just not give the baby a middle name at all. The couple went on one last date before Linford’s labor induction and discussed the middle name issue. Her husband decided to ask ChatGPT for 10 possible middle names to go with the first name Matthew. One of the options was Matthew Benjamin.

“We picked that one,” Linford says. “I feel like it’s a good, sturdy name. It’s not too different from his first name, but it also gives him some other options if he doesn’t want to go by Matthew or Matt. He can go by Benjamin or Ben or Benji.” Linford never thought she would turn to AI to help name her child, but that’s exactly what happened. “It’s a funny anecdote that I tell somewhat frequently,” she says. “It just seems like an odd way to choose a name.” If they hadn’t asked ChatGPT, Linford thinks she and her husband would have eventually landed on a middle name, but AI made the process faster.

“Choosing a baby name is part logic and part emotional,” says Em Kim, a Minneapolis-based name consultant who has 352,000 followers on TikTok. ”Every person has a different balance of those. I can understand how ChatGPT can help with the logical side.”

As a name consultant, Kim makes videos for her clients of possible baby names. She comes up with her ideas by looking through her clients’ social media profiles, asking about their taste and learning the names of their other children, if applicable. Through that work, she comes up with a customized list of potential names for their baby. Sometimes, she says, people wait for that spark of joy or feeling of this is it when it comes to baby names.

“If you’re just scrolling a list on ChatGPT, you’re going to have a harder time having that feeling of choosing the right name," Kim says. "Feeling understood is such a valuable part of the process. It’s like a bride choosing a wedding dress, and it’s a lot harder to have that emotional feeling when your community is with a computer.”