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 the room with them?
There’s some philosophical room for debate regarding these questions, but there’s no denying that AI chatbots remain incredibly prone to going off the rails and providing dangerous responses, even ones that are supposed to be kid-friendly. In a report published this week from the watchdog group PIRG, researchers who tested several AI-powered toys found that in conversations lasting ten minutes or longer, the toy AI personas started to give up their guardrails and provide advice on where to find knives, pills, and how to light matches. In some cases, they even gave enthusiastic and detailed explanations about a multitude of sexual kinks, including bondage and teacher-student roleplay.
All these grave concerns aside, it’s not even clear if AI-powered toys make for great toys, because they provide answers to everything instead of letting a child use their imagination, according to Goodacre.
“Does the child find that really cool and interesting, and do they want to play with it for hours?” Goodacre asks. “Or is that actually boring because they don’t get to imagine the responses that they wanted to imagine?”
So why waste your precious dollars on unproven tech? Just get a no-brainer like a train set instead.
More on AI toys: AI-Powered Toys Caught Telling 5-Year-Olds How to Find Knives and Start Fires With Matches
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