Put down the AI toy: kids need you, not a robot

2 months ago 19

There comes a time in every parent’s life when you realise you need the mental grit of a hostage negotiator to withstand the rapid-fire questions from your small child. My six-year-old daughter is in her “spelling” era. “Mum, how do you spell ‘elephant’? How do you spell ‘vacuum’? How do you spell ‘kitchen’?” I feel like I’m in a demented game show dreamt up in the literary circle of Hell.

But the other day, while testing out Google Gemini’s live function, which is a generative AI capable of speaking in the polite, clipped British tones of Emma Thompson, an idea was born. “Ask my phone how to spell elephant,” I told my daughter. She did, and Emma Thompson 2.0 (known henceforth as E.T. 2.0) politely acquiesced, spelling out the word and asking if my daughter would like to know anything else about elephants.

This became a half-hour conversation full of animal facts and names spelt out: “Rhinoceros: R H I N O C E R O S,” E.T. 2.0 said without a single trace of irritation in her automated voice. I suddenly realised that E.T. 2.0 is a better mother than I am. But then another thought sparked, like a glitch: should I be letting my kids near generative AI?

There are plenty of robot mother stories populating science fiction lately. Last year’s The Wild Robot made us fall in love with a robot that methodically teaches a baby duck to fly. In I Am Mother, from 2019, the robot mother in question is a little more sinister, more interested in genetic engineering than in baby ducks. We already have screen “babysitters” for kids, such as Cocomelon, that rainbow-coloured lobotomy, but we need to brace ourselves for generative AI babysitters. Mattel has recently partnered with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which should raise concerns about our parenting future.

There are already a range of toys out there that use generative AI to “talk” to kids, like singer Grimes’ brainchild “Grok”, a chatty soft toy designed to lure kids away from screen time and back into the real world. Mattel released a “talking” Barbie in 2015 (“think Siri, not ChatGPT” according to Vox), but privacy concerns made Mattel discontinue her in 2017. And yet, with this recent partnership with OpenAI, they’re still trying.

Talking toys are creepy AF. Most parents have a horror story of their malfunctioning Bluey toy calling out “Whackadoo!” in the dead of night under the bed, let alone throwing a chatty toy-bot in the mix. We can thank the films M3GAN and the recent sequel M3GAN 2.0, about a psychotic robot doll, for seeding our latest nightmares.

“Many parents want their children to understand emerging technologies. This leads to a mixed response of curiosity and concern,” Andrew McStay wrote in The Conversation. We know by now how tech companies feel about our personal information: playing around with it like a kid with a toy; and yet, despite our security concerns, we still willingly submit. No one wants to be left behind.

But after seeing my daughter chatting away with E.T. 2.0, my greater concern is that we’re losing the ability to give our kids undivided attention. It’s hard enough to resist screens with the pace of modern life, let alone being offered an even easier way out: a chatty robot who never tires of questions. And what about when we need to explain to our kids that their robo-toy doesn’t really care about them? It’ll be like telling them that Santa is the dude who runs the kebab shop with a fake beard all over again.

We’re so obsessed with mindfulness and meditation – why not focus some of those Zen muscles on our kids?

“You can’t get that time with your kids back,” people say, and it’s true. Kids can be boring or intense, sometimes both within the space of five seconds. If we lose our ability to sit with them or answer their inane questions because our attention spans are fraying faster than an old blanket, then we lose that time. I switched E.T. 2.0 off, despite my daughter’s protests, and she still asks if she can “chat to my phone”. I used to dread never-ending Cocomelon, but now there’s a scarier alternative: an AI best friend who knows more about rhinos than I do.

Cherie Gilmour is a freelance writer