31-03-2025
AI teddies could ‘harvest data from your children'
AI-powered teddy bears could harvest data from young children, the UK's leading computer scientist has warned.
Sir Nigel Shadbolt, a leading researcher in artificial intelligence, has raised concerns about 'smart toys' that use artificial intelligence to converse with children.
He said: 'When AI is integrated into the cuddly soft toys that a child grows up with, what does that do to the interaction, to the companionship, to the sense of self?
'It might allow that language deficit that children suffer in some homes to be eliminated because teddy is there to have those extended and rich conversations that really might enrich the child.
'But they also could be used to survey, they could be used to appropriate and harvest data from the child.'
A privacy threat
In 2023, Allan Wong, the chief executive of VTech, a Hong-Kong based electronics company which manufactures toys, suggested that AI-powered teddy bears could be available within the next few years.
Last year, Skyrocket, a Los Angeles-based toymaker, released the first talking stuffed toy to use AI software, called Poe the AI Story Bear. The toy, which hit the market in August, can generate and read aloud stories to children.
Sir Nigel, who was speaking at the Oxford Literature Festival, partnered with The Telegraph, said such technology could pose a privacy threat.
He called for strong regulation on how much data was stored by the toys and how it was used.
'We are going to see increasing efforts to build these consumer products,' he said.
'We can imagine a world in which those capabilities are cheap to implement, the models are easy to replicate and copy, so what will the protection around those classes of object be?
'In the past we worried with teddy bears about whether children would swallow the eyes if they came off.'
'This is an entirely different class of challenge. It is quite immediate.'
Sir Nigel is executive chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web.
He was speaking about his new book, As If Human: Ethics and Artificial Intelligence, which he co-wrote with Roger Hampson.
