Blåhaj PieFedAfter a teddy bear talked about kink, AI watchdogs are warning parents against smart toys
LadyButterfly she/her
www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/28/arti…
Advocates are fighting against the $16.7bn global smart-toy market, decrying surveillance and a lack of regulation
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If anyone really cared and keeping kids safe they wouldn’t be allowed to sell these things.
gustofwindI’m also disturbed by any parent that buys one
I don’t think you can do so accidentally
THIS CHRISTMAS’ NUMBER ONE SELLING TOY: AI TOYS.
The news interview Shirley Beswitch of White Plains, New York to ask her why she bought her 3 year old son an ai teddy bear for Christmas this year
“I base my entire identity around the thing I squeezed out of me a few years ago, but I’m not willing to put any actual work into it, you know? Well, except for bitching online constantly about how other people aren’t working to create a safer world for
My kid”
When asked if she had any concerns about reported issues with the toys, such as inappropriate comments and surveillance, Shirley said:
“Surveillance isn’t real. Plus it doesn’t matter if someone knows every intimate detail of my life. Sure I’m an immigrant but I did it right, and my son was born here in America, so it’s a non issue”
There’s some real cursed Tickle Me Elmo upgrade potential here
Another thing that just never occurred to me. LLMs in children’s toys.
What a time to be alive..
What, you think parents should watch over their kid and provide them interaction? What is this, year 1200?
fuck AI and such but as an engineer I kinda wanna know what it’s running. A custom chip? Kernel? “an openai model” locally on the bear?
LOL no it connects to WiFi and sends all of your data to a cloud server. These are voluntary surveillance devices.
“sorry honey your bear is not on the wifi and its api key has been rolled. it’s not gonna read you erotic harry potter fanfic.”
These are voluntary surveillance devices.
Like Alexa and Ring and Android and… (and others I can’t think of right now)
jabjoeWarnings? Good. More of this. Please, please, make this toxic like “nuclear” in the mind of the average citizen, I beg of you.
Oh man, who sells these toys so I can make sure to avoid them? Like, which website specifically There are so many, oh man! It’s so hard to know which specific one to avoid! And also, how do I make sure they can’t be modified to accept a fleshlight? You know, just to make extra sure I don’t get a slutty slop hole of a filth spewing teddy bear that will take on all-comers. No one wants that! That would be disgusting.
Honestly would it have been so hard to give it a filter? An earlier build of Siri would shut you down if you tried to flirt with it.
Just program them to redirect to conversations about violence. American parents are much more comfortable with that subject.
So sad and true
And to continue to accept school shootings as part of the education curriculum.
How else they gonna learn?
You need to have something for the kids to enjoy as well. Sprinkle in some school shooting scenarios.
Sex and violence overlap quite often. You come into this world through both. Kids are violent before they are ever sexual. This view of sex is always love and good and is perfectly okay for children to see before violence is quite frankly a child’s view of things in itself.
A friendly reminder that “AI toys” have no AI in them, they’re only an internet-connected microphone.
As a theoretical avenue of thought, I’m not sure there’s much harm for 11-17 year olds to talk to “smart” toys with no internet connectivity (at all, in principle, no fucking way) about that stuff. Not much different from Elisa. They are seeking and finding pretty explicit things on the Internet, with their peers, in media. It’s not a question of whether they should, it’s a fact that they predominantly do.
I live in a big city, but I’ve been to a smaller town nearby a couple of years ago, sitting on a bench after one LARP event and listening to a bunch of teens (13-15 years old) discussing everyone they were seeing passing by, and, eh, it was pretty clear they don’t just discuss sex. It’s funny to remember some specific phrases, but it was pretty depressing to sit there then, because when they weren’t talking about sex, they were talking about SCP and footy, and all the time I was thinking of a polite excuse to leave, until I just left. Made a friend, though.
You’re assuming that whatever they’re talking to is capable of giving only good advice with awareness and consideration of their living situation.
Sex education is beneficial if done well, but there is zero evidence suggesting AI can do anything well.
All automation of decision-making is AI. Entrusting it to an open model trained on lots of data - yeah, I agree it shouldn’t be done.
OK, but can we put them back on the market and just advertise them as talking about kink? For, uhhh, reasons.
Real Dolls just got a lot more real
OHHHHHH, so when kids toys are talking nasty it’s the PARENTS that need to be on alert, but not so much when THE PARENTS hand their kids unrestricted and unmonitored smartphones to seek out adult material on explicitly labeled adult websites! 🖕🤬🖕
Given how often teddy bears are choked and hugged too hard they have to be experts at bdsm.
Conan predicted this 11 years ago.
Yeah but who believes Barbarians?
It’s a done deal. The money is spent. This shit is being pushed on us regardless of its safety whether we like it or not.
HOLY FUCK, I always though that the toy market was cheaper, since I mean, WE ARE TALKING ABOUT TOYS, I didn’t even know that SO many people still pay for toys.
Me thinks you don’t have kids
I have a kid but he’s at the stage where the greatest level of entertainment can be derived by sticking things up his nose.
I won’t get him smart anything as a toy.
Anyone who works in IT wouldn’t want that, like most cyber security professionals everything in my house is either analogue (door locks, fire alarm) or not internet connected, I have a smart TV but it’s not connected to the internet and if I want to watch Netflix I just hook it up to the PS5 which basically is a media streaming service.
You guested right, I don’t like the idea of bringing new lifes to such a shitty work like this.
There’s not many alternatives for kids
After?
Oh my god I want one.
I know what i’m going to do on christmas :)