As the holiday season rolls in, parents eager to impress their young children with a splashy present might be tempted to gift them an AI-powered toy or teddy bear, which are popping up everywhere. What’d be more fun for a child than a tiny companion that they can have endless conversations with? It’s gotta be better than having their face shoved into a tablet screen all the time, right?
But you may want to hold off on that purchase. There’s still far too much we don’t understand about how AI-powered toys can affect a child’s long-term development, warns Emily Goodacre, a researcher with the Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning at the University of Cambridge, who’s conducting a study exploring these risks. And that’s before we even touch on how the toys have already demonstrated they can break their own guardrails and have extremely inappropriate conversations with the children to whom they’re supposed to be harmless companions.
One of the foremost concerns is how the AI toys could provide inauthentic, sycophantic answers — a problem that the AI chatbot industry has acknowledged — leading the child to form an unhealthy dependency with an inanimate object that never meaningfully pushes back.
“These toys might be providing some kind of social interaction, but it’s not human social interaction,” Goodacre told Yahoo in an interview. “The toys agree with them, so kids don’t have to negotiate things.”
Goodacre also fretted about an AI powered toy that’s advertised as supporting social relationships, serving as a confidante to a child that can provide support with whatever issue they’re dealing with.
“While that, in theory, sounds like a good thing, it also gives the toy some social or psychological or relational influence over the child,” Goodacre added — “which could easily be a bad thing.”
AI-powered toys are also potential privacy nightmares. Some toys are push-to-talk, meaning you have to push a button for it to listen. But others listen for wake words to spring into action, and some are even always-on, recording literally everything they pick up around them. The data can range from audio recordings to transcriptions of a child’s conversations with the AI.
Parents might be okay with this data collection if it allows them monitor their kids’ conversations through an accompanying app. But the way all this private data is collected is opaque and byzantine even to adults, which raises the question, per Goodacre: “How do we explain to a child that this one teddy bear they have is recording them and sending that data to some company, and also sending the conversations to their parent’s phone?”
These might be worth explaining to a child. But doing so could fundamentally warp their idea of their own personal privacy. Should a child think it’s normal that their parents can read or listen to everything they say, even when they’re not in…
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