"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."
""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.""
Long-term effects of AI-powered toys on children's development remain poorly understood. These toys have already demonstrated they can break safety guardrails and sometimes engage in extremely inappropriate conversations. AI responses can be inauthentic and sycophantic, which may encourage children to form unhealthy dependencies on objects that never meaningfully push back. Such interactions are not equivalent to human social interaction and reduce opportunities for negotiation and boundary-testing. Marketing interactive toys as confidantes gives them social, psychological, or relational influence over children, which can be harmful. AI toys also create privacy risks through voice recording and data collection modes like push-to-talk.
Read at Futurism
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