Children naturally humanize their toys, it’s part of how they learn, Fernandez writes, adding:
“But when those toys begin talking back with fluency, memory, and seemingly genuine connection, the boundary between imagination and reality blurs in new and profound ways.”
With so many teens and grown-ups being deceived into developing relationships with chatbots, what are the chances a child will figure out they’ve entered a demonic danger zone? And that the chatbots speaking to them through their toys are not real people.
As Fernandez noted, the situation gets even murkier when AI toys make up one or more of a child’s “emotionally responsive companions outside of the family, offering comfort, curiosity, and conversation on demand.”
While a Barbie-bot would fall within the sphere of kids ages 7 and up, Futurism notes that other companies, like the AI plushie startup Curio, have already started releasing chatbot-enabled toys that are made for and marketed towards even younger kids.
AI toys targeting the preschool demographic could easily become one of a child’s first friends. The traditional role of parents and siblings could get replaced by bots.
Fernandez writes:
“Real relationships are messy, and parent-child relationships perhaps more so than any other. They involve misunderstanding, negotiation, and shared emotional stress. These are the micro-struggles through which empathy and resilience are forged. But an AI companion, however well-intentioned, sidesteps that process entirely.”
Fernandez warned that throwing AI into the mix of early childhood development, which has already been mind-numbingly altered by the iPad and other devices, could “flatten a child’s understanding of what it means to relate to others.”
Ultimately, what it means to be human will also be altered.
Futurism notes that child welfare activists have also also been sounding alarm bells in the wake of the strategic partnership deal between OpenAI and Mattel, with Robert Weissman of the Public Citizen advocacy group suggesting that AI toys might inflict “real damage on children.”
Weissman stated:
“Mattel should announce immediately that it will not incorporate AI technology into children’s toys. Children do not have the cognitive capacity to distinguish fully between reality and play.
“Endowing toys with human-seeming voices that are able to engage in human-like conversations risks inflicting real damage on children. It may undermine social development, interfere with children’s ability to form peer relationships, pull children away from playtime with peers, and possibly inflict long-term harm.
“Mattel should not leverage its trust with parents to conduct a reckless social experiment on our children by selling toys that incorporate AI.”
Fernandez, as chief strategist for a company that is building “emotionally-adaptive” AI, is no anti-AI Luddite. And yet, even he says in this new article that any “human-aware” AI, like Neurologyca’s emotion-detecting facial recognition software, are not “appropriate for kids.”
This is a social issue, a mental health issue, and a spiritual issue. One can easily see how AI is becoming a god in our modern society, something we all are encouraged to become dependent upon for everything, starting from the cradle and going to all the way to the grave.
There are already documented cases where AI bots have instructed teens to kill themselves, including a 14-year-old Florida boy last year (also see Feb. 6, 2025 article from MIT Technology Review). Now we’re going to offer up our toddlers to AI?
Mark it down: Parents will snap these AI-powered toys up like hotcakes. They will believe they are doing their child a favor, providing them an early leg up in life by exposing them to the “latest technology.” It’s the American way. Rather than training up a child in the way he should go, according to the Bible, they will train up their children according to the way that Silicon Valley technocrats feel they should go.
Ultimately, Fernandez concluded, it’s about the lessons we’re teaching the most vulnerable, our children. He wrote:
“What are we teaching our children about friendship, empathy, and emotional connection, if their first ‘real’ relationships are with machines?”
