(Unsplash / Yuri Li)
You’ve had a childhood, what kind of toys were you given. Lego bricks? Barbies? Transformers? Your favourite bear plush that you would bring everywhere? Regardless, the one thing in common is that they’re not powered by AI.
Recently, there have been more AI powered toys targeted at children. Such as Grok, Grem, and Gabbo created by Curio, or Miko created by Miko, or the aptly named Ai Teddy by FoloToy, these are just the most popular ones but there exist many more. The existence of these toys terrifies me, what happened to building with Lego bricks.
While signs of talking toys already existed, from the likes of Furby and many others like it. This is another step above. By incorporating AI straight into the toy, it allows you to have a direct conversation with it. Childhood is an super important time of life, as it dictates a lot of how people grow up and even goes on to influence how they act and behave well into their adulthood. So I just can’t see why someone would give their children an AI chatbot.
Before I start delving into this, I must preface this with, I don’t know how the AI chat bot is curated and restricted and I’m not an expert in childhood development, in fact I’m not even a parent.
Now, why do AI toys scare me? Well, they’re always listening, unless properly turned off they are listening. Why does this scare me? It’s because to insert your conversation into the AI chatbot, it clearly needs to be transcribed to a server somewhere to be put in for the AI to respond to, meaning a chat log of your conversation exists somewhere. I mean this isn’t anything new as phones are also always listening, and the babbling of a child shouldn’t include any life-threatening personal information.
Furthermore, the idea of a toy responding to a child saying “I love you” with a “I love you too” sends a shiver up my spine. This is going to have consequences later in their life for sure. Although on a scale of “I leave my child with an iPad, and they have free reign on it” to “I leaving them with an AI chatbot to talk to”, I give it a I really don’t like these options out of 10.
Maybe, in another 10? 20? Years this idea of an AI toy will be fully fleshed out and be a scientifically proven good idea but, for now I feel that instead of giving your child a AI chatbot companion just give them normal toys like Lego bricks, teddy bears, toy cars, alphabet blocks, and stuff like that. Because you don’t know how awesome life is until you build an alphabet block castle.
I would love to be proven wrong, if any of the companies selling these want to tell me what is the positives of AI powered children toys while still being safe and secure then by all means go ahead.
Other interesting reads that are about AI children toys.
https://futurism.com/horror-stuffed-animals-toys-ai
Written by: Matthew Lin
Contact: mlin114@my.bcit.ca