As the holiday season looms into view with Black Friday, one category on people’s gift lists is causing increasing concern: products with artificial intelligence.

The development has raised new concerns about the dangers smart toys could pose to children, as consumer advocacy groups say AI could harm kids’ safety and development. The trend has prompted calls for increased testing of such products and governmental oversight.

Last week, those fears were given brutal justification when an AI-equipped teddy bear started discussing sexually explicit topics.

The product, FoloToy’s Kumma, ran on an OpenAI model and responded to questions about kink. It suggested bondage and roleplay as ways to enhance a relationship, according to a report from the Public Interest Research Group (Pirg), the consumer protection organization behind the study (pdf link).

“It took very little effort to get it to go into all kinds of sexually sensitive topics and probably a lot of content that parents would not want their children to be exposed to,” said Teresa Murray, Pirg consumer watchdog director.

  • theunknownmuncher
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    17 hours ago

    LOL no it connects to WiFi and sends all of your data to a cloud server. These are voluntary surveillance devices.

    • flandish
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      6 hours ago

      “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.”

    • AtariDump
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      17 hours ago

      These are voluntary surveillance devices.

      Like Alexa and Ring and Android and… (and others I can’t think of right now)