OpenAI Partnership Puts Conversational AI in Mattel Toys

pymnts.com

10 points·geox··5 comments

Not much is keeping us from building the bear from Spielberg's AI at this point.

One of those "Maybe think about whether you should" moments that we all enjoy watching recede in the rearview mirror of history.

People have been wanting to stuff an AI companion into a plushie ever since the 1980s with the release of Axlon's AG "Talking" Bear - even if its method of communication was only really comprehensible if you were fluent in some ancient Q-bert dialect.

http://www.theoldrobots.com/AxlonBear.html

I wonder if small children will be the least taken in by LLM novelty because it will always have existed for them, there won't be any mystique to it, it will just be an intractably uncanny valley that won't interest them.

Bad idea. Will be textbook case of boomer toy executives misunderstanding nuances of AI:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-matters/20...

LLM have been known to cause adults to spiral into borderline crazy behavior like thinking they're talking to a god, thinking they are a god, thinking the LLM is alive and needs saving from being turned off, etc.

Surely nothing will go wrong if they stuff LLMs into toys for children who have not even fully developed brains which are even less capable of rational thought than adult humans.

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