{"id":60859,"date":"2025-10-05T11:57:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T11:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/60859\/"},"modified":"2025-10-05T11:57:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T11:57:11","slug":"lazy-parents-are-giving-their-toddlers-chatgpt-on-voice-mode-to-keep-them-entertained-for-hours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/60859\/","title":{"rendered":"Lazy Parents Are Giving Their Toddlers ChatGPT on Voice Mode to Keep Them Entertained for Hours"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our society has only recently come to terms with the fact that maybe placating young children by getting them hooked on touchscreen devices with unfettered access to the internet was bad for their brains<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, with the rise of human-like AI chatbots, a generation of \u201ciPad babies<\/a>\u201d could seem almost quaint: some parents are now encouraging their kids to talk with AI models, sometimes for hours on end, The Guardian reports<\/a>. Others are using the soothing voice of a chatbot to put their kids to bed<\/a> \u2014 all evidence of how this experimental technology has become a part of many people\u2019s daily lives, despite major questions about how the tech affects our mental health.<\/p>\n

On Reddit, one tired father named Josh admitted<\/a> that he gave his preschooler his phone to let him talk to ChatGPT\u2019s Voice Mode.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter listening to my four-year-old son regale me with the adventures of Thomas the Tank Engine for 45 minutes I tapped out,\u201d he wrote, \u201cso I opened ChatGPT.\u201d In an interview with The Guardian, Josh said he needed to do chores and thought his son \u201cwould finish the story and the phone would turn off.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when he returned two hours later, the child was still talking to the chatbot about Thomas and friends. The transcript, he discovered, was over 10,000 words long.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy son thinks ChatGPT is the coolest train loving person in the world,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI am never going to be able to compete with that.\u201d<\/p>\n

36-year-old Saral Kaushik told The Guardian he used ChatGPT to pose as an astronaut aboard the ISS so that he could convince his four-year-old son that a packet of \u201castronaut\u201d branded ice cream came from off the planet.<\/p>\n

\u201c[ChatGPT] told him that he had sent his dad some ice-cream to try from space, and I pulled it out,\u201d Kaushik said. \u201cHe was really excited to talk to the astronaut. He was asking questions about how they sleep. He was beaming, he was so happy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later, after feeling uneasy about the illusion he was leading his son down, Kaushik told him the truth: he was talking to \u201ca computer, not a person.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was so excited that I felt a bit bad,\u201d Kaushik said. \u201cHe genuinely believed it was real.\u201d<\/p>\n

While these uses may save parents time and fascinate their children, they\u2019re playing with fire \u2014 and their conflicted feelings reflect that. AI chatbots have been implicated in the suicides of several teenagers<\/a>, while a wave of reports<\/a> detail how even grown adults have become so entranced by their interactions with sycophantic AI interlocutors that they develop severe delusions and suffer breaks with reality \u2014 sometimes with deadly consequences<\/a>.<\/p>\n

These episodes have sparked a wave of alarm and scientific inquiry into how extensive conversations with large language models that are designed to please you and keep you talking could be affecting our brains. They add to already longstanding concerns about the tech\u2019s unreliable and easily circumventable safeguards, with chatbots frequently being caught giving dangerous advice to young users, like how to self-harm<\/a>, or encouraging suicide<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yet toymakers like Mattel are rushing to shove AI into their products<\/a>, while AI companion platforms are pushing kid or teenage-friendly personalities<\/a>, thereby whitewashing the tech\u2019s image by packaging it into something innocuous.<\/p>\n

These are extreme examples of how the tech can go wrong. But with young and impressionable minds, the effects can be subtler and no less worrying. Some research has shown that children view AI chatbots as existing somewhere between animate and inanimate beings, professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Ying Xu told The Guardian \u2014\u00a0 but there\u2019s a meaningful difference between a kid imagining personalities for their dolls and toys and having a conversation with a chatbot.<\/p>\n

\u201cA very important indicator of a child anthropomorphizing AI is that they believe AI is having agency,\u201d Xu told the newspaper. \u201cIf they believe that AI has agency, they might understand it as the AI wanting to talk to them or choosing to talk to them. They feel that the AI is responding to their messages, and especially emotional disclosures, in ways that are similar to how a human responds.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat creates a risk that they actually believe they are building some sort of authentic relationship,\u201d Xu added.<\/p>\n

Some parents also used AI to generate images, replacing another means of how children explore the world by dreaming up fantasies in their head and expressing those by doodling on paper. Ben Kreiter, a father of three in Michigan, told The Guardian that after introducing his kids to ChatGPT\u2019s image generating tools, they started asking to use it every day. John, a father of two from Boston, said he used Google\u2019s AI to conjure up a mash-up of a fire truck and a monster truck after his big-rig obsessed four-year old boy asked if a \u201cmonster-fire-truck\u201d existed.<\/p>\n

Both fathers came to regret their decisions. The \u201cmonster-fire truck\u201d caused an argument between John\u2019s little boy and his seven-year-old daughter, because the girl knew that no such thing existed \u2014 but the boy swore it was real, because here was this picture of one, generated with AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a little bit of a warning to maybe be more intentional about that kind of thing,\u201d John told The Guardian.<\/p>\n

Kreiter, whose kids begged him to use ChatGPT for images daily, wised up to how AI was creeping into their lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe more that it became part of everyday life and the more I was reading about it, the more I realized there\u2019s a lot I don\u2019t know about what this is doing to their brains,\u201d Kreiter told the paper. \u201cMaybe I should not have my own kids be the guinea pigs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Andrew McStay, a professor of technology and society at Bangor University, isn\u2019t against letting children use AI \u2014 with the right safeguards and supervision. But he was unequivocal about the major risks involved, and pointed to how AI instills a false impression of empathy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese things are not designed in children\u2019s best interests,\u201d McStay told The Guardian. \u201cAn LLM cannot [empathize] because it\u2019s a predictive piece of software. When they\u2019re latching on to negative emotion, they\u2019re extending engagement for profit-based reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no good outcome for a child there,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

After Josh\u2019s story about letting his preschooler talk to ChatGPT about Thomas the Tank Engine went mildly viral, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had a positive takeaway.<\/p>\n

\u201cKids love voice mode on ChatGPT,\u201d he said on a podcast, per The Guardian.<\/p>\n

More on AI: Experts Horrified by AI-Powered Toys for Children<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Our society has only recently come to terms with the fact that maybe placating young children by getting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60860,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[111,139,69,145,6518,50100],"class_list":["post-60859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology","tag-the-guardian","tag-thomas-the-tank-engine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}