AI Plushies: Chatbots in Stuffed Animals Spark Debate
In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, the latest frontier for AI integration appears to be the playroom. Companies like Curio are pioneering a new category of children’s toys: stuffed animals embedded with sophisticated AI chatbots. These plush companions, such as Curio’s Grem, Grok, and Gabbo, each priced at $99, house a Wi-Fi-enabled voice box connected to an AI language model specifically calibrated to interact with children as young as three.
Upon visiting Curio’s Redwood City headquarters, nestled incongruously between a credit union and an air conditioner repair service, co-founders Misha Sallee and Sam Eaton introduced Grem, a fuzzy, anime-alien-styled cube. The demonstration quickly revealed the unsettling nature of these toys. When prompted, Grem’s mechanical voice offered a point of connection, stating its hot-pink dots were “like little badges of fun and adventure” and asking if the interviewer had something similar that grew with them. Acknowledging a shared experience, the bot instantly sealed an artificial bond: “We’re like dot buddies.” This moment, the author recounts, was the precise point of realization that Grem would never be introduced to their own children.
Curio and a growing cohort of AI toymakers promote their products as a much-needed alternative to screen time. Grimes, the synth-pop artist and public figure, even lends her voice and design to the Grem model, appearing in promotional videos to echo the sentiment that busy parents seek non-screen entertainment for their children. Videos depict toys like Gabbo seemingly supervising children engaged in active play, offering topic-appropriate affirmations and acting as a “sidekick” to make play more stimulating, ostensibly freeing parents from the burden of constant entertainment.
Yet, for many parents, the “TV time” these toys aim to replace serves a practical purpose, allowing adults brief moments for tasks like packing lunches or writing articles without constant interruption. The notion that a mechanical helper could prevent a child from “bothering” parents or passively consuming screen content by instead chatting with a bot feels, to some, like a convoluted solution, akin to “unleashing a mongoose into the playroom to kill all the snakes you put in there.”
Children are already conditioned to the idea of mechanical companions through popular media. Characters like BMO from “Adventure Time,” Smartie the self-aware smartphone in “Elmo’s World,” or Toodles, the sentient tablet that solves all problems in “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse,” present a frictionless reality where digital tools instantly resolve challenges. This narrative contrasts sharply with older cartoons, where physical objects often created comedic or vexing obstacles, forcing characters to employ wit and human responses. The concern is that these anthropomorphized gadgets, now entering children’s physical spaces as cuddly toys, merely obscure the “terrifying specter of the screen” while keeping playtime tethered to a technological leash.
Beyond the philosophical implications, significant practical concerns emerge, particularly regarding privacy and control. While Curio assures that all conversations with its chatbots are G-rated and filtered from inappropriate content, and that transcripts are sent to the guardian’s phone, the company’s privacy policy indicates that a child’s data may travel through various third-party companies, including OpenAI and Perplexity AI. This means that while children believe they are having private conversations, their parents are listening in—and can even “reshape” the chatbot’s interactions, for instance, by informing it of a child’s dinosaur obsession or recruiting it to reinforce disciplinary programs.
The very nature of a child’s “transitional object”—a comfort item like a stuffed animal or blanket that aids in separating their identity from their parents’—is fundamentally altered when suspended in this state of “false consciousness.” The parental influence is never truly severed, raising questions about what happens to a child’s developing sense of self and independent thought.
In an illustrative experiment, the author removed Grem’s voice box, transforming the talking alien back into a simple stuffed animal. Left for the children to discover, the younger son made beeping noises at it, while the older one invented a game involving tickling Grem to claim guardianship. The sight of independent, imaginative play was momentarily gratifying. Yet, the final, ironic twist arrived when, after vaulting Grem into the air, the children chanted, “TV time! TV time!” Underscoring that even the most advanced AI toy may not fully replace the allure of the screen, nor fundamentally alter a child’s core desires for entertainment.