What we learned the last time we put AI in a Barbie
is a senior technology correspondent at Vox and author of the User Friendly newsletter. He's spent 15 years covering the intersection of technology, culture, and politics at places like The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Vice.
The first big Christmas gift I remember getting was an animatronic bear named Teddy Ruxpin. Thanks to a cassette tape hidden in his belly, he could talk, his eyes and mouth moving in a famously creepy way. Later that winter, when I was sick with a fever, I hallucinated that the toy came alive and attacked me. I never saw Teddy again after that.
These days, toys can do a lot more than tell pre-recorded stories. So-called smart toys, many of which are internet-connected, are a $20 billion business, and increasingly, they're artificially intelligent. Mattel and OpenAI announced a partnership last week to 'bring the magic of AI to age-appropriate play experiences with an emphasis on innovation, privacy, and safety.' They're planning to announce their first product later this year. It's unclear what this might entail: maybe it's Barbies that can gossip with you or a self-driving Hot Wheels or something we haven't even dreamed up yet.
All of this makes me nervous as a young parent. I already knew that generative AI was invading classrooms and filling the internet with slop, but I wasn't expecting it to take over the toy aisle so soon. After all, we're already struggling to figure out how to manage our kids' relationship with the technology in their lives, from screen time to the uncanny videos made to trick YouTube's algorithm. As it seeps further into our society, a growing number of people are using AI without even realizing it. So you can't blame me for being anxious about how children might encounter the technology in unexpected ways.
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AI-powered toys are not as new as you might think. They're not even new for Mattel. A decade ago, the toy giant released Hello Barbie, an internet-connected doll that listened to kids and used AI to respond (think Siri, not ChatGPT). It was essentially the same concept as Teddy Ruxpin except with a lot of digital vulnerabilities. Naturally, security researchers took notice and hacked Hello Barbie, revealing that bad actors could steal personal information or eavesdrop on conversations children were having with the doll. Mattel discontinued the doll in 2017. Hello Barbie later made an appearance in the Barbie movie alongside other poor toy choices like Sugar Daddy Ken and Pregnant Midge.
Despite this cautionary tale, companies keep trying to make talking AI toys a thing. One more recent example comes from the mind of Grimes, of all people. Inspired by the son she shares with Elon Musk, the musician teamed up with a company called Curio to create a stuffed rocket ship named Grok. The embodied chatbot is supposed to learn about whomever is playing with it and become a personalized companion. In real life, Grok is frustratingly dumb, according to Katie Arnold-Ratliff, a mom and writer who chronicled her son's experience with the toy in New York magazine last year.
'What captures the hearts and minds of young children is often what they create for themselves with the inanimate artifacts.'
'When it started remembering things about my kid, and speaking back to him, he was amazed,' Arnold-Ratliff told me this week. 'That awe very quickly dissipated once it was like, why are you talking about this completely unrelated thing.'
Grok is still somewhere in their house, she said, but it has been turned off for quite some time. It turns out Arnold-Ratliff's son is more interested in inanimate objects that he can make come alive with his imagination. Sure, he'll play Mario on his Nintendo Switch for long stretches of time, but afterward, he'll draw his own worlds on paper. He'll even create digital versions of new levels on Super Mario Maker but get frustrated when the software can't keep up with his imagination.
This is a miraculous paradox when it comes to kids and certain tech-powered toys. Although an adult might think that, for instance, AI could prompt kids to think about play in new ways or become an innovative new imaginary friend, kids tend to prefer imagining on their own terms. That's according to Naomi Aguiar, PhD, a researcher at Oregon State University who studies how children form relationships with AI chatbots.
'There's nothing wrong with children's imaginations. They work fine,' Aguiar said. 'What captures the hearts and minds of young children is often what they create for themselves with the inanimate artifacts.'
Aguiar did concede that AI can be a powerful educational tool for kids, especially for those who don't have access to resources or who may be on the spectrum. 'If we focus on solutions to specific problems and train the models to do that, it could open up a lot of opportunities,' she told me. Putting AI in a Barbie, however, is not solving a particular problem.
None of this means that I'm allergic to the concept of tech-centric toys for kids. Quite the opposite, in fact. Ahead of the Mattel-OpenAI announcement, I'd started researching toys my kid might like that incorporated some technology — enough to make them especially interesting and engaging — but stopped short of triggering dystopian nightmares. Much to my surprise, what I found was something of a mashup between completely inanimate objects and that terrifying Teddy Ruxpin.
One of these toys is called a Toniebox, a screen-free audio player with little figurines called Tonies that you put atop the box to unlock content — namely songs, stories, and so forth. Licenses abound, so you can buy a Tonie that corresponds with pretty much any popular kids character, like Disney princesses or Paddington Bear. There are also so-called Creative Tonies that allow you to upload your own audio. For instance, you could ostensibly have a stand-in for a grandparent to enable story time, even if Grandma and Grandpa are not physically there. The whole experience is mediated with an app that the kid never needs to see.
There's also the Yoto Player and the Yoto Mini, which are similar to the Toniebox but use cards instead of figurines and have a very low-resolution display that can show a clock or a pixelated character. Because it has that display, kids can also create custom icons to show up when they record their own content onto a card. Yoto has been beta-testing an AI-powered story generator, which is designed for parents to create custom stories for their kids.
If those audio players are geared toward story time, a company called Nex makes a video game console for playtime. It's called Nex Playground, and kids use their movements to control it. This happens thanks to a camera equipped with machine-learning capabilities to recognize your movements and expressions. So imagine playing Wii Sports, but instead of throwing the Nintendo controller through your TV screen when you're trying to bowl, you make the bowling motion to play the game.
Nex makes most of its games in-house, and all of the computation needed for its gameplay happens on the device itself. That means there's no data being collected or sent to the cloud. Once you download a game, you don't even have to be online to play it.
'We envision toys that can just grow in a way where they become a new way to interact with technology for kids and evolve into something that's much deeper, much more meaningful for families,' David Lee, CEO of Nex, said when I asked him about the future of toys.
It will be a few more years before I have to worry about my kid's interactions with a video game console, much less an AI-powered Barbie — and certainly not Teddy Ruxpin. But she loves her Toniebox. She talks to the figurines and lines them up alongside each other, like a little posse. I have no idea what she's imagining them saying back. In a way, that's the point.
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'The way that we think about how we've slept can really make us feel better,' Thea Gallagher, a psychologist at NYU Langone Health, told me. 'If we think we've had a good night of sleep, we will actually feel better physically and mentally and emotionally.' Placebo effect notwithstanding, I'm also surprised by how much I listen to an app when it tells me to go to bed. Thanks to the Oura app, I've developed better sleeping habits, and frankly, I feel better. Do start out with a clear goal in mind When I first got an Apple Watch, I liked the rings that track how much you move. Moving more seemed like an easy goal that would improve my health. But some trackers seem to collect data for the sake of collecting data, with no particular objective. Continuous glucose monitors, or CGMs, have been lifesavers for people with diabetes for years, but a growing list of companies sell them to non-diabetics over the counter. These biosensors stick a filament into your skin that measures the amount of glucose in your interstitial fluid, which can give you a good guess about what your blood glucose is at any given moment. If you don't know a lot about how metabolism works, the readouts can be horrifying. The first bowl of cereal I ate spiked my blood sugar outside of the normal range, which threw me into a panic — a panic that didn't entirely subside until I stopped wearing these sensors. Part of what fueled that anxiety was the fact that I didn't actually know how to make sense of the data that these monitors spit out. Most of them alert you when your glucose is spiking and then give you some kind of score, but it's not clear what a good score indicates other than that you've managed to eat fewer carbs, probably. The whole experience can feel like a high-tech diet. 'There's not a lot of time and effort spent on figuring out what is the actual question that I have that's really important to me and that I'm willing to go through some some effort and troubleshooting in order to come out the other side with a genuine discovery that I can use in my regular life,' said Gary Wolf, a tech journalist and founder of Quantified Self, a community of people who have been tracking their health metrics since the mid-2000s. Don't send your poop or blood to anyone in the mail Health tracking isn't confined to wearable devices. Some companies, like Viome, Function Health, and Ultrahuman, are getting into the labwork business. The idea is that you can pay for extra testing and get all the results back in an app that promises to help you understand the intricate details of your gut microbiome or metabolic health. Some assign you a biological age based on your test results, and all of them cost many hundreds of dollars. I did a battery of tests through Viome, including the gut microbiome test, which involved filling up little vials with poop and blood and dropping them at a post office. (Disclosure: Viome waived the fees for me.) The results seemed to tell me nothing that I didn't already reveal on the pre-test questionnaire, but I did have the opportunity to buy some very expensive supplements to address my problem areas. I don't recommend doing any of this. Don't pay for a subscription unless the gadget really improves your life If you've ever seen someone wearing a band around their wrist with a little hunk of plastic where the watch face should be, you've seen a Whoop band. This fitness-forward health tracker works a lot like a smartwatch without a screen, but the app is geared toward gym rats. The app not only gives you a strain score that measures how hard you've worked out, it also encourages you to recover. It costs $30 a month to enjoy all the features. It's not just Whoop that wants you to keep paying. Oura also charges a subscription fee to unlock all of its features, but it's just $6. Apple has the Fitness+ subscription for $10, but that includes a bunch of classes, not unique features on the Watch. All of these little fees add up over time, so if you really just want basic functionality, skip the subscription. Without it, you can still see your sleep, readiness, and activity scores on an Oura ring. (That's all I look at anyway.) The Whoop band doesn't work at all if you don't pay. Do take breaks The best advice I got from the many experts I talked to throughout my health tracking journey was to take off the devices from time to time. The absolute flood of information about my health often made me uneasy, and it even led to some disordered behaviors, especially when it came to tracking my glucose levels and seeing my readings start veering away from normal levels. Still, I wondered if I shouldn't intervene somehow. 'Sometimes atypical results found by wearables can make people anxious, and it may be difficult to offer them definite reassurance for these results,' said Dr. David Klonoff, president of the Diabetes Technology Society. 'If traditional medicine cannot provide definite answers, then these people sometimes turn to natural or alternative medicine.' Some health tracking companies want to take your money every month to keep using their services. Some want to sell you the latest generation of their device. Some want to sell you supplements. They all want you to keep using the trackers and apps, even if they're not necessarily making you healthier. That's good to keep in mind. So check in with yourself when you're wearing a health tracker. Take it off, and leave it off for a while. Without a torrent of alerts telling you to stand, sleep, or eat, you may actually feel better.
