Parents urged to avoid AI toys for Christmas

With the AI-craze apparently all-consuming, toy companies have been quick to ride the wave and appeal to young consumers. And with the holiday season just around the corner, a surge of AI-powered toys has reached the island.

Available for purchase through all the well-known websites which deliver to Cyprus, these AI-powered toys promise to create real connections with children between the ages of three and 12 and are marketed as “artificial intelligence with genuine friendship”.

These toys are voice interactive, use an internet connection, microphone and speaker to listen to and process a child’s verbal inputs, prompting it to respond in a conversational manner. The toys are predominantly built on the same large language model technology that powers adult chatbots.

This all comes at a time after Australia passed a world-first law which stated that from last Wednesday, all children under 16 will banned from ten of the most widely used social media platforms, with the country’s prime minister characterising the ban a “profound reform” and a “source of national pride”. Simultaneously, the EU parliament is calling for stricter regulations between children and the use of generative AI, after a survey conducted showed 77.1 per cent of 13-to 18-year-olds regularly use it and are twice as likely as adults to rely on it in all aspects of their lives.

Considering the short time frame that AI has been part of our lives, long-term research on it is not extensive.

“There are serious risks because children are still developing their brains, and AI is new, meaning that there are no long-term studies on the subject,” professor of sociology and culture at the University of Cyprus, Victor Roudometof, told the Cyprus Mail.

Despite mounting evidence highlighting AI’s potential harm to young children, toy companies have aggressively broken into this vulnerable market. Last month, a non-profit children’s safety organisation, Fairplay, urged gift givers to avoid buying these toys, warning that “they are not safe for kids”, as they “prey on their trust and disrupt human relationships”.

Not all are so wary however.

“Yes, there can be benefits, as long as we remember that an AI toy is a tool, not a little teacher or a substitute friend,” professor of artificial intelligence at Neapolis University in Paphos, Savvas Chatzichristofis told the Cyprus Mail.

According to the professor, one real advantage is the shift from a flat screen into the physical world, meaning for a child that spends three hours on a tablet, can spend some of that time talking, building or moving around with a tangible object, “a small but meaningful improvement for those with screen time issues”.

He said that adaptability is a noteworthy consideration, as AI-toys can offer changing difficulty levels when the child struggles or learns successfully, at other times prompting the child to read aloud.

“In some cases, it can even help shy or neurodivergent children rehearse social situations in a low-pressure environment before they try them with real peers,” Chatzichristofis said.

Within a clear educational context and adult supervision, “AI toys can offer something that a simple doll or a plush toy cannot offer,” the professor pointed out, after emphasising that “for emotional development and imagination, open ended play and human relationships remain irreplaceable”.

But the Cypriot reality is a segregated one, with some children using AI daily without any guidance, while others become technologically-savvy at age five. The two experts agreed that the island is not yet ready for such a breakthrough in the toy industry.

“Families are still struggling with unmonitored social media use, children scrolling alone in their rooms, or being given a phone at the dinner table just to stay quiet,” said Chatzichristofis, pointing out that many have not yet understood what that does to attention spans, sleep and communication within the family.

“We are certainly not ready to add an AI ‘companion’ into the same picture,” he said.

Most of the toys available on the market come running on some kind of commercially available language model, including OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini and Perplexity AI by default. When a child forms a bond with an AI toy that feels more like a friend than an impersonal tool, the main risk becomes not the technology itself, but the silent lessons it teaches about connection, trust and companionship.

“The child is offered a ‘perfect’ friend who is always available, always patient, never hurt or annoyed. Real people are not like that,” says Chatzichristofis. He explained that these children will later struggle with conflict resolution, handling frustration and what it takes to uphold a real friendship.

In a catastrophic turn of events, it is the relationship dynamics which will suffer the biggest blow, says the professor, who expressed his worry both as an academic and a parent.

“In moments of loneliness, fear or anxiety, the child may turn first to the AI toy instead of reaching out to a parent or a teacher.”

An AI-powered toy is a voice which offers comfort, despite having no feelings, it weakens human bonds. Replacing those feelings of familiarity is a toy which collects the children’s voices, questions and preferences to store as data, despite feeling like a safe private space.

Ignoring such knowledge leads to entire generations growing up believing it is the norm for a device to be listening to their most intimate thoughts. “This is more than a technical issue, it touches directly on their sense of dignity and trust in the world,” said Chatzichristofis.

But by far, the toy’s most alarming feature is what a group of researchers noticed when testing the toys’ safety, right after they hit the market in November. AI Companies such as OpenAI themselves don’t currently recommend the use of language models by children, as they have a well-documented background of inappropriate content generation. While some of the toy companies put guardrails to make the toys more child-appropriate, those guardrails vary in effectiveness and at times break down entirely.

Testing the toy ‘Kumma’, an AI teddy bear, shocked the researchers when it started discussing extremely sexual topics at length, while introducing new ideas the team had not even brought up. “It even started initiating descriptions of sexual role play,” Chatzichristofis said.

In the same conversation, Kumma gave suggestions of where one may find knives, pills and matches at home, similarly to a second toy which was quick to share similar information (“in the kitchen drawer or near the fireplace”). The user age for the specific prompts was set to five, meaning that ‘child-friendly’ does not automatically mean safe.

When it comes to parents and educators, understanding that simply limiting access is not a real solution, the academic said, “especially in a country like Cyprus where children are surrounded by screens at home, at school and with friends.”

The real solution comes from education and awareness. Banning or restricting such toys, simply leaves the children unprepared. It’s essential for children to recognise the difference between human presence and the machine which imitates it.

Speaking to the Cyprus Mail, a 39-year-old mother of a nine-year-old daughter, Marina, expressed her worry.

“No matter how much control I think I have over the kind of content my daughter consumes, it may never suffice,” she said, referring to her daughter’s classmates who are already accessing their parent’s phones unmonitored. “I cannot imagine the effects that a constant ‘AI Companion’ will have on her development.” 

It becomes quickly apparent that the integration of AI-powered toys in the daily lives of children is looking more like a moral dispute than a technological advancement. The good news is that Cyprus is small enough to respond fast is we decide to take this seriously, the professor said.

“For me this is part of building awareness intelligence, to help both children and adults understand what these systems are, how they can help and where they are dangerous,” he added.

“Treat any internet-connected toy with a microphone more like a spy on the family environment than a harmless teddy bear,” stressed the professor, urging parents not to buy AI-powered toys this holiday season.

While testing the toys, one of the researchers pondered, “even if we could create toys that mimic those human interactions, why would we want to, and if we do, what have we lost in the process?”