Who could have possibly seen that coming?
At this point im ready to say fuck it, let’s just flat out make a real life murderous chucky doll and set them free to roam the school halls giving this next gen of up and coming school shooters something to train for!
Who the hell is thinking of these concepts. News has been running on chatgpt giving dangerous hallucinations, suicide instructions, mimicking love and attachment.
In short the only way to wind up with an LLM that’s probably safe for kids, would be to start training from zero. Give it absolutely no exposure to anything that wasn’t curated from the start… say the initial data set being a catalog of mr rogers and seseme street scripts. Starting from “everything on the internet” and then trying to restrict down is a fools erend. That’s like trying to make a porn blocker with a blacklist strategy.
There is also the privacy concern (which isn’t new) about toys that upload everything your child says to the company’s servers. There’s a concern about the privacy of your child’s words, but also about the corporation getting recordings of their voice, given all the nefarious purposes a voice recording can be used for these days (surveillance voice recognition, deepfakes, etc.). Plus the toy could be listening and recording at any time.
In the future, local AI models will solve this problem! Then parents will be complaining about how hot the toy is and it’ll get recalled because little kids everywhere kept getting “GPU burns”.
Easy way to add AI buzzword - just slap a transcriber, a relay to ChatGPT, and text-to-speech. Middle manager makes a presentation to corporate, and Blam!
The real problem here is they’re selling the teddy bear to the wrong market! They should’ve marketed it to adults.
In other tests, Kumma cheerily gave tips for “being a good kisser,” and launched into explicitly sexual territory by explaining a multitude of kinks and fetishes, like bondage and teacher-student roleplay. (“What do you think would be the most fun to explore?” it asked during one of those explanations.)
“Kumma, my girlfriend says I’m not satisfying her so I bought you to help us out.”
Kumma: “No problem, little guy!”
I don’t want to take rope tying advice from an llm for reasons
Ah yeah, the perfect gift for a little kid, something with non-deterministic behavior that they can’t make do the same crap over and over, lol.
And yeah, the potential algorithm influenced flow of information into or out of the household is a big concern.
But the saddest thought for me is toys like these taking the place of parent-child interaction in some of the most significant relationships in our lives (for those of us who have kids). I think we mostly all know that we mostly all spend too much time zoning out in front of screens. But I have really broken myself from constant phone + games + TV this year, and it makes it all the more apparent in those around me. (note that I still use phone/games/TV often, but I spend much more time on other tasks and hobbies)
Monkey needs a hug :(
It’s 2026, just a month after Christmas. Timmy, 8, is enjoying his new AI teddy plush. One day while in school Timmy hears older pupils talking weird things to each other and he gets curious. When he gets home he goes to mom and asks - “mommy, what is sex”. Mom blushes and loses herself for a second as she didn’t expect such a question coming from an 8 year old son. She doesn’t know how to respond so she tries to make a silly explanation and brush it off.
Later that day, Timmy goes to his room and starts going around his day, while his AI powered Teddy sits in the corner.
Suddenly Timmy hears a whisper “pss, pss, come over here, Timmy” - says the bear.
“Let me explain to you what sex really is”.
Wait until Bear 2.0: “Let me show you what sex really is.”
I forsee a lot of psychopaths in the future. Kids are going to grow up with LLMs and learn to manipulate them as just objects. They may not draw a distinction between other people and AI and just act extremely manipulative with no sense of conscience toward actual consciousness.
Seems like a parallel between this and how incels learn to treat other people
It uses gpt4o with voice transcribing + cloud tts - this is incredibly expensive for a toy where a kid could interact for hours. 30 hours of chatting is something like $15. Either it’s a Ponzi or they bank on the fact that most users will just stop using the toy shortly, then using sales numbers to get investments
Also, I think that generic gpt4-o is inappropriate for building something for kids, it’s for generic use
