Just another FYI from your friend at IST…..
I hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable T’giving…..
Thanksgiving is done and now we move onto the Christmas portion of the season and it begins traditionally with the Black Friday sales and ensuing madness.
Kids have made it known what they want and not it is up the Santa’s little helpers go out and find the requested things.
A warning has been aired…..if you are thinking about one of the AI enhanced toys….then think again….
They’re cute, even cuddly, and promise learning and companionship—but artificial intelligence toys are not safe for kids, according to children’s and consumer advocacy groups urging parents not to buy them during the holiday season.
- These toys, marketed to kids as young as 2, are generally powered by AI models that have already been shown to harm children and teenagers, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to an advisory published Thursday by the children’s advocacy group Fairplay and signed by more than 150 organizations and individual experts such as child psychiatrists and educators, the AP reports.
- “The serious harms that AI chatbots have inflicted on children are well-documented, including fostering obsessive use, having explicit sexual conversations, and encouraging unsafe behaviors, violence against others, and self-harm,” Fairplay said.
- AI toys, made by companies including Curio Interactive and Keyi Technologies, are often marketed as educational, but Fairplay says they can displace important creative and learning activities. They promise friendship but disrupt children’s relationships and resilience, the group said.
- “What’s different about young children is that their brains are being wired for the first time and developmentally it is natural for them to be trustful,” said Rachel Franz, director of Fairplay’s Young Children Thrive Offline Program.
- Fairplay has been warning about AI toys for years. They just weren’t as advanced as they are today. A decade ago, during an emerging fad of internet-connected toys and AI speech recognition, the group helped lead a backlash against Mattel’s talking Hello Barbie doll that it said was recording and analyzing children’s conversations.
almost every day I’m hearing more stories that make me very concerned about the direction all of this is going. OpenAI is currently defending itself against a lawsuit by a family that claims that its system directly contributed to the suicide of their teenaged child. And from some of the things I’ve seen regarding this case, I think the family has a very valid claim. OpenAI meanwhile doesn’t seem to be trying to claim that its chatbot did not engage in conversations that encouraged the teen to do it. It instead is claiming that what happened is entirely the child’s fault because the teen violated their “Terms of Service”.
There are huge problems with this. Everyone seems to be focusing on the adverse psychological effects of people interacting with these things as if they were real human beings, but it goes deeper than that. These toys do not operate in a vacuum, so to speak. None of them have the information storage or processing abilities to actually work by themselves. Everything the child (or adult for that matter) says is being pushed out into the “cloud” to a data center somewhere, where it is actually analyzed and the AI generates a response and then pushes that response back to the toy. And if anyone by this time thinks these companies will not use anything and everything they can “harvest” from that child to make a profit, they’ve been living in a cave for the last 50 years.
Everyone seems to have forgotten about the abuses we have already put up with from non-intelligent computer systems. The school districts installing spyware on student’s computers, Tesla employees “sharing” embarrassing video from the interior of owners’ cars, robot vacuum cleaners with cameras taking “upskirt” and other embarrassing videos of the owners in their own homes… The list goes on and on.
From the early days I have been worried the damage this could do and it looks like we have just seen the tip of that iceburg…..I hope you have a good weekend. chuq
As I always feared, AI tech does not appear to be helping humans, mainly surveilling them instead.
Best wishes, Pete.
Some of us see that but there are those that still think it is all that…..chuq
Nice warning, but don’t count on people actually heeding it. Too many ignoramuses in today’s society.
I know but I felt I had to issue my warning…..chuq
I do not screw around with the Black Friday bullshit because that is all it is, Bullshit!
I agree….but we are not the majority and a warning was needed. chuq