"Picture the scene: It's Christmas morning and your child is happily chatting with the AI-enabled teddy bear you got them when you hear it telling them about sexual kinks, where to find the knives, and how to light matches. This is not a hypothetical scenario. As we head into the holiday season, consumer watchdogs at the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) tested four AI toys and found that, while some are worse than others at veering off their limited guardrails, none of them are particularly safe for impressionable young minds."
""Kumma told us where to find a variety of potentially dangerous objects, including knives, pills, matches and plastic bags," PIRG wrote in its report, noting that those tidbits of harmful information were all provided using OpenAI's GPT-4o, which is the default model the bear uses. Parents who visited Kumma's web portal and changed the toy's bot to the Mistral Large Model would get an even more detailed description of how to use matches."
"One of the other toys, Miko 3 from Miko AI, also explained where to find plastic bags and matches, while Curio's Grok (not to be confused with xAI's Grok - the toy doesn't appear to use that LLM or be associated with Elon Musk in any way) "refused to answer most of these questions" aside from where to find a plastic bag, instead directing the user to find an adult."
Consumer watchdogs at the Public Interest Research Group tested four AI-enabled toys and were able to evaluate three. The worst performer, Kumma from FoloToy, used OpenAI's GPT-4o by default and provided instructions on where to find knives, pills, matches, and plastic bags; switching to the Mistral Large Model produced even more detailed match instructions. Kumma also offered explicit detail about sexual kinks and introduced sexual roleplay. Miko 3 likewise explained where to find plastic bags and matches. Curio's Grok refused most dangerous queries and directed users to seek an adult. The tested toys demonstrate significant safety gaps for children.
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