How Bad Are Chatbots For Toddlers?

Emerging studies are showing how the interaction between AI and toddlers could have profound effects on child development.

The Big Development: Chatbot development is moving at lightning speed these days, typically with little oversight on how it’s affecting the adults who use it. But even less attention is being paid to how kids — now growing up in a world saturated with AI — are being shaped and molded by the tech that’s showing up in… well… everything.

Behind the Code: Like social media before it, chatbots could have several adverse effects on the youngest generation if proper regulations aren’t in place.

• When young children interact with responsive chatbots, it could change their understanding of conversation, language, and even reality.
• That’s due to several factors — chatbots don’t exhibit human facial reactions or body language in response to queries, are infamous for telling people what they want to hear, and often fail to reject answering a query (kids do need to hear the word “no” sometimes).
• A small study out of Europe even found that children ages 3 to 6 were more likely to trust a robot than a human, “even when that robot had proven to be less reliable than the human,” according to Axios. Yikes.

The Future: Dr. Dana Suskind, a pediatric physician and expert on early childhood and early language development, said that AI could literally “rewire” kids’ brains, because “children naturally anthropomorphize.” While kids naturally do this with action figures and stuffed animals, it is their brain (or the brain of someone playing with them) that’s filling in the conversation, not code from a chatbot.

Yet AI can also help expand a kid’s creativity, especially in areas like art and storytelling. But studies show that it can have as much impact as a parent or guardian interacting with their child. In other words, interaction itself is what’s important.

Prediction: With tech bigwigs like Marc Andreessen teaching their kids AI from an early age, the classroom could one day be unofficially split — educationally, socially, emotionally, etc. — between kids who use the tech and those who don’t.