Equity Brighton & Sussex General Branch

On the topic of our kids having AI friends (long) I got my 6yo Daughter an AI toy for her b-day that arrived for Xmas instead. She unpacked it all excited, I explained that this isn't like other toys, that this one has AI in it (she of course knows what AI is, seen the things I've built and interacted with them, chatted with chatGPT and Santa mode, knows that daddy is "doing AI" etc') So a very interesting experiment happened after @_magicaltoys reached out and fixed the issue referenced below (very quick turnaround! thank you!) So...she played with this Dino, chatted with it, and then... learned to turn it off, and doesn't want it to talk anymore. She still loves playing with it, dressed it up, it now has paper shoes and a top hat that we made together, but every time I ask her if she'd like to chat with it, she says no. The few times I turned it back on, and she did speak with it, she chatted for a bit, and then just... turned it off again, not wanting to engage at all. I gently asked why, and wasn't able to really understand where's the resistance, it's not weird to her. In fact, at one point she was pretending the dino was a baby, and it was turned on, so I told her, let's ask it to.. pretend to be a baby, and it obliged and said ok. So we asked it to cry. Granted @_magicaltoys don't yet have the amazing advanced voice mode like openAI in there, so it did it's best but it sounded weird, which made her laugh really hard. it was basically making crying sounds like talking. And also, there are some technical issues still, the voice is sometimes choppy, so it could be that it's still uncanny for her? I'm honestly fascinated about why the AI aspect of this toy didn't connect with my 6yo (and btw, I have a very curious 4yo boy, who could give 0 fucks about this toy also, he's very observant, and usually wants everything his sister has, wanted 0 time with Dino) Is this uncanny valley? a couple of times she didn't want to talk to it, and came to me to whisper to ask me to turn it off (the same happened a couple of times with chatGPT Santa mode btw now thinking about it) Is this just now knowing what to say? 🤔 It could be the simple fact that she was playing with some other things, and the toy kept wanting to engage and take the attention to itself vs the game that she was playing. I know that I have a sample size of 1 kid here, and I'm sure many many things will change, as she'll grow and learn to interact with more AIs in different forms, but the first "toy" contact was interestingly almost a complete failure (from the AI perspective, the Toy experience as I said, was dope) Anyway, this area is def unexplored, will keep you guys posted how this goes and if she shows interest or picks it up again.