Throw them in the ocean!

Out of the mouths of babes ...

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What kids think about AI

Let’s talk about generations and technology.

• Once upon a time there were Millennials. They were singled out in one think piece after another for being the first generation growing up with the internet.

• Next came Generation Z, the digital natives. Their oldest members were only 10 when Steve Jobs took to the stage in 2007 and introduced the iPhone.

• Now, we have Generation Alpha, which, for better or for worse, will be known as the first AI-native generation.

How much Generation Alpha will use AI is interesting. But more fascinating to me is how growing up interacting with AI will change how they interact with people.

That question came to mind when I read about a recent University of Washington study in which researchers introduced young children to voice-enabled AI toys and watched their reactions.

(I’ve embedded a video at the end of this article so you can see the reaction for yourself. The study was presented at a conference in the United Kingdom earlier this year.)

This was a very small study with only eight children ages 6 to 11. But their reactions were fascinating:

• In the first stage, they seemed open to the toys, asked their names, and tried to play with them.

• In the second stage, they quickly became frustrated. The AI toys didn’t understand what they were saying, talked over them, or steered conversations away.

• By stage 3, the kids became flat-out antagonistic in some cases, calling the toys “ugly” and “evil,” and “joking about throwing them in the ocean.”

Again: small study.

And these are young kids. So, while there are a lot of studies out there showing the degree to which they are using AI (substantially), there aren’t many yet on how they react to AI.

Or, even better, how their reactions to AI might ultimately change how they interact with other humans.

Researchers studying adults, however, have already found evidence (in an unrelated study) that interactions with bots can affect subsequent interactions with people:

Human-bot interactions do spill over to human-human ones, and in two ways.
First, interacting with a bot reduces cooperation not only during the initial interaction, but also reduces downstream cooperation toward a new human partner.
Additionally, bots’ (like human partners’) behavior matters: Interactions with bots playing tit-for-tat promote cooperation, and interactions with noncooperative bots reduce cooperation toward downstream human partners.
The implementation of bots in previously human-only spaces alters human cooperation, not just toward bots, but toward other humans as well.

Frankly, I’ve caught myself changing how I react to people after interacting a lot with AI chatbots.

Not everyone, of course. But earlier this year, I wrote about how my frustration with AI chat functions like ChatGPT and Claude led me to be very direct and brusque — even rude — with human customer service representatives.

But I’m not Generation Alpha, not by a mile. And I grew up in a world without AI, so at least I remember how I communicated before it arrived.

In other words, I was very aware of what I was doing, and I stopped as soon as I realized. Heck, I even wrote the article about it.

Anyway, it’s early, and we can’t yet predict how AI will change the world in which kids today grow up — any more than we could have predicted AI-generated brainrot videos when Steve Jobs took the stage in 2007.

But I predict it will be a very important question over the next few years. As study co-author Jason Yip, a UW associate professor in the Information School and director of KidsTeam UW, put it:

For as long as children have played with toys, they’ve imparted their imagination to the toy to make it move and talk.
Now the script has been flipped and the toy has this imitation of imagination. We’ve never lived through that before.

Here’s the video:

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Other things worth knowing …

• Telegraph: Tennessee to execute first woman in 200 years. Christa Pike committed a notorious murder in 1995 at the age of 18.

• CBC: Alumni are threatening to pull funding, celebrities are lashing out, and people are boycotting institutions associated with an alleged gang rape at Cornell University. The case came into the spotlight after the victim, known in court documents as Jane Doe, filed a civil lawsuit alleging the private Ivy League university protected the seven men, now dubbed “the Cornell 7.”

• CNBC: America’s Canadian import restrictions come into force. Here are the products barred from entry.

• WSJ: The Treasury Department will automatically enroll tens of millions of children in the government’s new Trump Accounts as soon as this week, replacing the previous structure that required parents or guardians to sign up.

• The Independent: Dutch police have arrested a suspected member of the ShinyHunters hacker group and accused the 24-year-old Amsterdam man of trying to arrange two murders. He was arrested on September 15, before the group claimed to have hacked the FBI.

• Politico: Republicans wanted Jack Smith to give them a smoking gun. They got a gaffe instead.

• AP: More than a dozen words long used in Bermuda and across the Caribbean got an official nod from the Oxford English Dictionary. First in line is “bimpert,” a Bermudian word of unknown origin used to describe a stupid or foolish person. Another colorful addition is “hornerman,” used in Trinidad and Tobago since 1975 to describe an unfaithful man or a man having a relationship with someone else’s partner.

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Natalia Gusakova on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!