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.”
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