Who could have possibly seen that coming?
I feel this in itself is a sign of the times. I mean look at all the Trump voters who are only now waking up to the possibility that this person does not have their best interests at heart, while so many have been saying exactly that for 10 years.
I’m sure there’s a proverb about it, too. Like “fools vote trump and laugh at wisdom” or so.
So, first the world cheers people doing horrible shit. And when that produces predictably horrible results we try to pull it back again. I see a pattern here.
Some for 50 years. Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. Him running for office used to be a joke.
I’m sure there’s a proverb about it, too.
“If you think putting AI in a child’s toy or voting for Trump is a good idea you might just be a fucking idiot”?
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” commonly attributed to Mark Twain, though that tie is unconfirmed. Fits well with the AI hype, with big tech, and with all consumerism. Also Trump.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
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”.
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
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’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.”
Monkey needs a hug :(
