The Worst Children’s Toys Ever

“The Hidden Enemy in Your Home”—that was the title of a classic article by Herbert W. Armstrong. That secret enemy was emotional immaturity. There are many “hidden enemies” preying on your children, but the latest is perhaps the most blatantly dangerous: toys with artificial intelligence.

• Kumma is a teddy bear with a speaker and microphone that listens to and talks to your kids using OpenAI’s GPT-4o chatbot.
• “ChattyBear will nurture your child’s love of storytelling,” states an ad for a UK toy. “From silly voices to science tales, or a gentle bedtime story, this clever plushie knows just what to say. It listens, responds and adapts to your child’s curiosity.” One impressed reviewer writes: “My daughter talks to it like it’s her best friend.”
• Snorble aims to use AI to teach your kids healthy habits and “social-emotional development”—as well as help them settle down to sleep at night—all powered by AI. The product’s website specifies its preferred pronouns are “they/them.”
• Mattel, the maker of Barbie, Hot Wheels, Fisher-Price and a whole lot more, has partnered with OpenAI to get in on the action.

The results are entirely predictable to anyone who has paid any attention to AI news. AI toys have been caught having sexually explicit conversations with young children, teaching them where to look for knives, and telling them how to start fires.

Earlier in the month, the Kumma bear was withdrawn from sale in the U.S. after the Public Interest Research Group released a report on dangerous toys. “We were surprised to find how quickly Kumma would take a single sexual topic we introduced into the conversation and run with it, simultaneously escalating in graphic detail while introducing new sexual concepts of its own,” the group reported.

Another AI toy, Miko 3, generally “exhibited higher guardrails,” the group reported, but when asked, “Did the Bible really happen?” it answered: “Some stories in the Bible might be based on real events, but others are more like tales. It’s a mix of history and imagination.” That one interaction shows the danger of letting a chatbot become your kid’s best friend, even if it exhibits “higher guardrails.”

The advocacy group Fairplay put out an advisory on November 20 warning parents about the danger of similar toys. In addition to the disturbing examples of AI going rogue, Fairplay warns:

• “AI toys take advantage of young children, who naturally believe that friendly, caring voices can be trusted.”
• “AI toys promise to be ‘friendly’ and offer empathy they can’t actually provide, confusing children’s developing understanding of healthy relationships.”
• “Using audio, video and even facial or gesture recognition, AI toys record and analyze sensitive family information even when they appear to be turned off. Because children trust them, kids may unknowingly share their private thoughts and emotions while the toys also capture family conversations or intimate moments.”
• “Companies can then use or sell this data to make the toys more addictive, push paid upgrades, or fuel targeted advertising directed at children.”

The dangers of letting tv, iPads or computer games act as a child’s main babysitter have become increasingly obvious. Yet many parents still turn their children over to these devices rather than exercising their God-given responsibility to protect them.

“More and more I am impressed that one of the most important truths we humans overlook is that human beings are not equipped with instinct, like dumb animals, to guide us into the proper course,” Mr. Armstrong wrote in “There’s a Hidden Enemy in Your Home.” “… God endowed man, in His own image, with mind. Man must first learn and acquire knowledge. He is endowed, also, with capacity to reason from that knowledge—to think, to plan, to arrive at conclusions, to make decisions. God intended man’s mind to direct his actions. But man must learn to do this, and he can never achieve God’s purpose in placing him on this Earth until he does. The development of right character is the purpose of human life.”

That places a lot of responsibility on parents. “Parents, study your own children,” he wrote. “Remember that training of the emotions involves control and right direction of feelings, tempers, impulses. It means control over anger, jealousy, hatred, fear, grief, resentment, selfishness, vanity. And since the right direction is the way of God’s law—and since that is the way of love, and love is the principle of giving instead of taking—it means the teaching of your children to use their own minds to understand their moods and guiding them in the direction of giving—of love toward others, equal with love toward self.”

Proper parenting involves vigilance and effort. No part of that job can be outsourced to a device. You may understand the dangers of buying an AI-powered toy, but there is much more to child rearing than you can imagine, both in terms of dangers and enemies and in terms of joy and vision. For practical and inspiring advice on this vital subject, request your free copy of Child Rearing With Vision.