Why Kids Need to Question AI and How Parents Can Help

In the 1940s, the radio was a transformative technology. But it wasn't an immediate hit. That's because the radios of the early 1900s looked like this: unwieldy contraptions of exposed wires and glowing vacuum tubes, like a science-fair project gone wrong. It wasn't until 1929 when radio started to look like this, with its sleek Bakelite -- that's a kind of plastic shell -- that they became insanely popular -- but at a critical cost. Transparency. What happens when technology becomes a black box and we stop being able to see what's going on inside? Fast forward 100 years.

Today, the sci-fi artificial intelligence devices of our dreams have been woven into the very fabric of modern life. But like the radio, these systems are "bakelited." We've hidden the machine behind frictionless interfaces, beneath friendly voices and inside children's toys. Over the past decade, I've had a lot of conversations with kids about AI as an MIT researcher and founding member of Day of AI, a nonprofit creating opportunities for millions of children around the world to learn about how AI works. And here's what I've been seeing.

These devices mimic intelligence and friendliness so well that children learn to trust them -- sometimes more than they trust themselves. And there is real danger of children becoming overly reliant on or inappropriately attached to their smart toys. That said, with some intentional choices on the part of adults, we can help children see the technology for what it really is, objects that they can play with, or even program, rather than entities that they should look to for all the answers. My journey exploring kids and their relationships with AI began early in my days at MIT, working on this fluffy, adorable social robot, Tega. So Tega being a social robot means that its goal is to help people with their goals.

Social robots are used throughout healthcare, customer service and education. In Tega's case, we were building it to see if a robot could help young children as they were learning how to read. Let me show you a quick clip of Tega in action. Student: Hm, I'm lavender. Tega: What are we trying to find? Student: We are trying to find lavender-color stuff. Tega: OK. The word was lavender? Student: Yes. And what is lavender, though? Tega: Lavender is purple. Student: Yes. Just like my friend loves lavender.

Tega: Hmm. Randi Williams: So as you saw, it's Tega's job to keep the child engaged in the story. Tega will ask questions, add funny commentary, and of course, weave in that target vocabulary for the week. And it was my job to introduce Tega and get children oriented to how to use it. So one day I come into the study room and I say, "Hi, my name is Randi, this is Tega. You're going to read some stories with Tega today. Let me show you how it works." And the girl I was working with, a kindergartener, stops me.

"No thanks," she says. "I know all about robots. I have an Alexa at home, and she's my best friend. Watch this." And then she proceeded to show me how my robot worked. What do we make of a response like that? Well first, I thought it was kind of impressive that this girl who, again, was learning how to read, could effortlessly navigate the internet thanks to voice technology. And for context, I had to know how to read, write and type before I could ask Jeeves a question. But for her, not so much. But secondly, I was a little bit disappointed that this girl didn't think that my super cool robot was so super cool.

And when I took a step back, I realized it wasn't just her. We are raising a generation of children who are growing up with AI and smart toys, and they tend to see these devices not as virtual assistants or technology, but as friends, distinct beings with a mind, a will and a soul. And that made me really curious about what children make of this technology. How much do they understand about what's going on? So to investigate that question, I ran a study. I had 30 children between the ages of three and 11 come together to interact with a whole bunch of different smart toys all at once.

We had toy robots, talking dolls, text-based chatbots, and of course, plenty of virtual assistants like Alexa and Google Home. One of the girls in the study, her favorite animal was sloths. She loves sloths. She'd been telling us all day how much she loves sloths. And so naturally, when she got hold of an Alexa, she wanted to learn more about sloths from Alexa. So she picks up Alexa and says, "Alexa, what do sloths eat?" And then Alexa, very helpfully, replied, "I'm sorry, I don't know how to help you with that."

The girl looked disappointed for a second and then all of a sudden perked right back up. "Oh, I know," she says, and she picked up a second Alexa. "I'll see if this one knows." The limitations of AI are not only frustrating and confusing for children, but research in child-robot interaction shows that it can make them vulnerable to even more serious risks, like manipulation or accidental exposure to inappropriate content or security breaches. And for me personally, even the devices that are marketed as educational or screen-free are still corrupt because they're consumer products.

And they seem to be designed as something that can be endlessly engaging or addictive. They want to become your child's best friend and gain their trust so that they can advertise to them. Or better yet, sell that trust back to you for $20 a month. The bottom line is that smart toys open a digital door into children's playtime, bedroom and hearts. And if you're thinking about opening that door, my advice to you would be to take a very careful look at what's on the other side. The good news is that we can mitigate the risks of AI to children by leaning into something they already do. Kids are natural reverse engineers.

Over and over again, I've watched children playing with AI devices trying to break it, just asking seemingly absurd questions like, "Alexa, how old are you?" Or "Cosmo" -- which is a toy robot car -- "Can you jump?" Or "Hey Google, is it OK if I eat you?" And these questions, while silly, also are an example of children probing the machine about its very nature. Play is inherent to how children understand the world, which means that maybe we can use it to help them understand what's happening with the technologies they're interacting with. What if children could take apart and reconstruct their smart toys the same way that they take apart and reconstruct physical blocks? That was the idea behind another social robot that I worked on, "PopBot."

As you can see, PopBot's body is made completely out of LEGO bricks, and it's kind of like a typical smart toy, except I built it to make the most complex ideas of modern AI -- logical reasoning, machine learning, generative AI -- easy to understand through hands-on, child-driven play. The idea was, if a four-year-old could understand AI, then anyone can. So for example, to learn about machine learning, what children would do is they would play Rock, Paper, Scissors against the robot. Let me show you a quick clip of what that looks like with PopBots. Person: OK, go ahead. Student: Scissors. shoot. I choose rock.

PopBot: Rock. You chose rock, and I choose rock. PopBot: It's a tie. Student: Rock! Student 2: It's a tie! RW: The beauties of a real-life classroom study. So before children could start playing against their PopBot, first they had to teach their PopBot the rules of Rock, Paper, Scissors. And then, as they played the game, rounds like that, over and over again, what PopBot would try to do is pick up on their pattern so that it could predict what move it could play to beat them. And if you're between the ages of four and six, pretty soon it gets hard, if not impossible, to beat your PopBot.

There was one boy who was very frustrated by this, and so I planted a mischievous idea in his head. I said, "Well, what if you taught your PopBot the wrong rules of Rock, Paper, Scissors? That way as you played it, you would win every single time." And he really liked that idea. Our little act of AI sabotage created a unique opportunity to talk about who teaches AI the rules. Well, people do. And so I asked him, "Well, if you can teach your PopBot the wrong rules of Rock, Paper, Scissors, how do you know Alexa was taught the right ones?" Which led to a very insightful conversation where he discussed how much we can trust AI

and the importance of verifying what it says, with an adult's help, just to make sure that Alexa has been taught all the right rules. The big idea that I want children to understand is that AI is not magic. It's a set of rules written by people. And it's up to us, those of us who have been around for a bit longer, to make sure that children aren't being programmed by their toys, but rather things work the other way around. We need to raise a generation of children who know that they are the ones who get to write, and even rewrite, the rules of AI. And this work starts at the dinner table.

So you're all sitting down and a question gets asked to the nearest AI chatbot or smart toy. When it responds, rather than just accepting that answer, wonder, "I wonder why it answered the way it did." Or ask aloud, "Do we agree or disagree with that answer?" "Who do we think wrote the rules to make it work the way that it does?" And the thing is, you don't need to know the answers to all these questions or become some sort of AI expert -- that's not the point. What children need is a model of what it means to be a curious user of AI. They need someone who will sit down with them, explore the machine, poke at its limits, challenge its responses, and most importantly, dare to rewrite its rules.

And I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of what's happening in children's toy boxes, but the bigger picture is that we should all be treating the everyday AI systems that we interact with the same way. I 100 percent believe that we can help children build safer relationships with their smart toys, and we all need to build better relationships between ourselves and the technologies we interact with every day. I believe in a world where no one is left in the dark by technology, and where everyone has the inherent right to play a part in shaping the systems that shape our lives.

Thank you. (Cheers and applause) Chris Duffy: Randi, fantastic talk. I'd love to ask you just one question here, which is, before I was a parent, I had some very black-and-white thinking around screens. I had this pristine vision of, I would never use screens with my child at all. And then as I think many parents have experienced, that crashed into the reality of needing to put sunscreen on him or to clip his nails. I'm wondering, AI, as a new technology and these smart toys, how do you see parents balancing the ideals and the best case of what we want versus the practical realities of kids being exposed to these things

in ways that are sometimes out of our control, even as a parent? RW: Yeah, I really love that question. I think, first, because it gives so much grace to the fact that parenting is hard and there are a lot of challenges. I think, in the world of artificial intelligence, something I think a lot about is human wisdom, right? And we've actually been kind of struggling with this problem for a long time. There were books and then the radio and then TV and then the internet, and now it's artificial intelligence. And I think the advice from then still rings true now, which is, don't leave children on their own to figure it out.

Rules are great, but better is to help your child learn how to interact with them in a way that works with your family's values and the ways that you want to engage in the world. So if you're willing to take that journey with your child, I think that could do a lot of good. CD: Thank you, that's a great answer. Another big round of applause for Randi.