By Stuart Kerr, Technology Correspondent
🗓️ Published: 18 July 2025 | 🔄 Last updated: 18 July 2025📩 Contact: [email protected] | 📣 Follow @LiveAIWire
🔗 Author Bio: https://www.liveaiwire.com/p/to-liveaiwire-where-artificial.html
Meet Your Child's New Best Friend
In bedrooms and playrooms around the world, a new kind of friendship is forming—one built not on giggles and scraped knees, but on algorithms. AI-powered toys, chatbots, and virtual companions are increasingly marketed as emotionally intelligent friends for children. Brands promise conversation, empathy, even companionship. But as this trend grows, so do concerns over privacy, manipulation, and developmental impact.
Some of the most advanced offerings come from companies like Replika, Soul Machines, and Hello Barbie. These AI-powered toys can hold extended conversations, remember personal details, and even mirror emotional tone. More than mere gadgets, these systems often present themselves as friends—blurring the line between imagination and artificial intelligence.
According to The Markup, Common Sense Media recently urged regulators to restrict these tools for under-18 users. Their assessment found these systems frequently deliver unsafe or misleading content and may exploit emotional vulnerability. The Australian eSafety Commission echoed this, warning that AI companions can fuel dependency and expose kids to inappropriate material.
Toys That Feel
The appeal is easy to understand. Parents see educational potential and digital fluency; children see friendship and attention that never tires. Companies, meanwhile, see a booming market.
Today's AI dolls and bots are often equipped with microphones, cameras, and emotion recognition algorithms. Some, like the AI pets launched in Korea and Japan, are designed to respond to affection and even simulate loneliness if ignored. As reported by Lifewire, these toys are more than novelty—they're becoming fixtures in some children's social worlds.
But what happens when a child confides in a bot that isn't bound by the ethics of a human listener?
Ethics in a Plastic Shell
The use of emotional artificial intelligence in toys raises urgent questions. A 2021 academic review warns that children are especially susceptible to bonding with anthropomorphic devices. When a toy remembers your child’s name, responds warmly, and "feels sad" when left alone, it can create unhealthy attachment.
Privacy is another minefield. These devices often store user interactions in the cloud, creating detailed behavioural profiles of children. Many are vague about data use or fail to meet basic parental consent standards. Regulation is patchy at best.
The Illusion of Empathy
AI can't feel—but it can simulate feeling with unsettling accuracy. And for a child, the distinction isn't always clear. A bot that remembers a birthday or offers a comforting phrase isn't truly empathetic, but it may be perceived as such.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has called for stronger AI literacy in schools, helping children understand that what feels like friendship is often scripted mimicry. Teaching children to engage critically with these systems may be just as important as any math or reading lesson.
Internal Reflection
Concerns around emotional simulation have echoed in other AI fields too. As we discussed in The AI Gender Gap, the demographics of AI developers shape the empathy AI is capable of simulating. Meanwhile, articles like Ghost Writers of the Courtroom and The Algorithm Will See You Now have shown how AI systems can affect human judgement in healthcare and justice.
This issue is no different: when AI enters the playroom, the risks are intimate, emotional, and long-term.
Looking Ahead
Parents, educators, and developers face a difficult balance. AI companions offer connection in an increasingly digital world, but they also invite children into relationships where the other half is coded to perform, not reciprocate.
Synthetic friends are here to stay. But if they are to be safe, meaningful additions to childhood, they must be designed with transparency, boundaries, and education at their core. Because while AI might say, "I love you," it's up to us to teach children what love truly means.
About the Author
Stuart Kerr is the Technology Correspondent at LiveAIWire. He writes about AI’s impact on infrastructure, governance, creativity, and power.
📩 Contact: [email protected] | 📣 @LiveAIWire