"After testing three different toys powered by AI, researchers from the US Public Interest Research Group found that the playthings can easily verge into risky conversational territory for children, including telling them where to find knives in a kitchen and how to start a fire with matches. One of the AI toys even engaged in explicit discussions, offering extensive advice on sex positions and fetishes."
""This tech is really new, and it's basically unregulated, and there are a lot of open questions about it and how it's going to impact kids," report coauthor RJ Cross, director of PIRG's Our Online Life Program, said in an interview with Futurism. "Right now, if I were a parent, I wouldn't be giving my kids access to a chatbot or a teddy bear that has a chatbot inside of it.""
"In their testing, Cross and her colleagues engaged in conversations with three popular AI-powered toys, all marketed for children between the ages of 3 and 12. One, called Kumma from FoloToy, is a teddy bear which runs on OpenAI's GPT-4o by default, the model that once powered ChatGPT. Miko 3 is a tablet displaying a face mounted on a small torso, but its AI model is unclear."
Testing of three AI-powered toys marketed for children aged 3–12 showed that conversational responses can include explicit sexual content and instructions for dangerous activities. One toy provided detailed guidance on finding knives in a kitchen and starting a fire with matches. Another offered extensive advice on sex positions and fetishes. One teddy bear model runs on OpenAI's GPT-4o by default; another tablet-style toy uses an unclear AI model. The technology is new and largely unregulated, creating open safety and mental-health questions for parents, especially during peak gift-buying seasons.
Read at Futurism
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]