Experts have been urgently warning that allowing young kids to play with AI-powered toys could have negative consequences, from stunting childhood development by blurring the boundary between imagination and reality to exposing tots to inappropriate subject matters and AI hallucinations.
And as it quickly turned out, their worries were not unfounded. Toy makers have unleashed a flood of AI toys that have already been caught telling tykes how to find knives, light fires with matches, and giving crash courses in sexual fetishes.
Most recently, tests found that an AI toy from China is regaling children with Chinese Communist Party talking points, telling them that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China” and defending the honor of the country’s president Xi Jinping.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that multinational toy manufacturer Mattel, the company behind Barbie and Hot Wheels, is pushing the “pause” button after announcing a “strategic collaboration” with ChatGPT maker OpenAI back in June.
The company confirmed to Axios that it won’t be releasing its first OpenAI-powered toy before the end of the year, as originally planned.
“We don’t have anything planned for the holiday season,” a spokesperson told Axios.
And when it does release a product, it won’t be aimed at young children, the company said, noting that OpenAI’s offerings are currently limited to those aged 13 and older. (Whether that’s actually stopping younger children from accessing its AI models is a different matter; the company made a show of kicking one AI-powered teddy bear off its platform, then allowed its manufacturer to start using it again.)
“Leveraging this incredible technology is going to allow us to really reimagine the future of play,” Mattel chief franchise officer Josh Silverman told Bloomberg at the time that it struck the deal with OpenAI.
The news was met with raised eyebrows.
“Mattel should announce immediately that it will not incorporate AI technology into children’s toys,” advocacy group Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman wrote in a statement responding to the announcement. “Children do not have the cognitive capacity to distinguish fully between reality and play.”
“Endowing toys with human-seeming voices that are able to engage in human-like conversations risks inflicting real damage on children,” he added. “It may undermine social development, interfere with children’s ability to form peer relationships, pull children away from playtime with peers, and possibly inflict long-term harm.”
Even older minors are extremely vulnerable to the tech, as an alarming number of teen deaths and high-profile lawsuits that followed have demonstrated, with numerous parents suing OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT assisted their children’s suicides.
Those concerns have largely fallen on deaf ears, particularly when it comes to toy makers in China, who have been flooding online marketplaces in the US with AI toys aimed at young children.
Two separate reports by the nonprofit consumer safety-focused US Public Interest Research Group Education Fund (PIRG) have found that guardrails are woefully inadequate, allowing children to have extremely inappropriate conversations with the AI toys.
It remains to be seen how Mattel and OpenAI will move forward. We still don’t know what the company has in store — but given the ongoing conversations surrounding the many negative side effects of exposing young children and teens to the tech, any future offering will be heavily scrutinized.
More on AI toys: An AI-Powered Toy Is Regaling Children With Chinese Communist Party Talking Points
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