This year, the American Santa Claus is offering American children a marvellous toy. A soft toy that makes conversation! Imagine a big cube of padded fabric fitted with a face and with a conversational robot inside. The soft toy has a zipped back pocket containing a Wi-Fi-enabled voice box. It is thus linked to an artificial intelligence language model programmed to talk with children from the age of three, the manufacturer tells us.
These “soft toys” are offered for 99 dollars (about 84 euros) as an alternative to screens. The sales pitch could not be clearer: “Parents, you are very busy, but you don’t want your children to stay in front of a screen because many experts have denounced their harmfulness. So buy them a connected soft toy ”.
The child talks to their soft toy, and their soft toy answers. There are several models suited to the child’s tastes. They are called Grem, Gabbo and Grok… like the AI offered by Elon Musk.
To reassure parents, questions about sex, violence, politics and swearing will go unanswered. The soft toy will reply that it is a bit complicated for it, that it mostly likes to play, and it will ask you what your favourite story or game is.
But the manufacturers no doubt judged this precaution insufficient. So they doubled it with another. The conversations between a child and their soft toy are transcribed and sent to the guardian’s phone. And not only can they listen to them, they can also change the chatbot’s answers: for example, ask it to steer the child away from their passion for dinosaurs and towards a school curriculum.
And later? When the child grows up, there is bound to be a moment when they will understand that everything they said to their soft toy was listened to by their parents, and that they may even have used this tool to influence their choices. The trust the child had placed in their parents until then will be brutally and irreparably broken. They risk turning away from them at the very moments when they would need them most. Will parents have the courage to anticipate that moment by explaining to their child that they have monitored and influenced them since the age of three by remote-controlling what their cuddly toy said?
Are such “toys” likely to come to Europe?
And in France? Ary has arrived at Leclerc to be put under the Christmas tree! It is the first soft toy able to converse through generative artificial intelligence to be sold in a French supermarket. Sold for 100 euros, it promises to stimulate children while freeing up time for their parents. Here again, its electronic box is fitted with a microphone, a speaker, a battery and a Wi-Fi antenna, although it does not allow the eavesdropping and parental controls of its American equivalent. On the other hand, Ary knows how to steer away from contentious subjects in the same way, offers to tell children stories, flatters them and even implies that it has emotions of its own. While chatbots are already recognised as creating forms of emotional dependence in children and teenagers, will we have to wait a generation before they are banned for young children?
Yet Annex III, point 1, of the AI Act adopted by Europe in 2024 states: “AI systems intended to be used by children are considered high-risk AI systems because of the specific vulnerability of this audience ”.
S.T.
