Chatbots' new job: minding tots

Axios

5 days ago

Young children who directly interact with chatbots face new developmental risks, pediatricians and psychologists warn.
Why it matters: Assessing the impacts early could help protect a new generation from becoming guinea pigs for tech we don't fully understand.
The big picture: Most kids under five aren't using voice-based AI yet. Young kids already see AI-generated content — but on its own, that isn't necessarily a new problem.
Low-quality images and videos commonly known as AI slop don't differ that much from the low end of mass-produced kids' media that's been around for decades.
The real concern is interaction with live AI, which can be both powerfully engaging and confusing at the same time.
Imagine "Blue's Clues," but the character answers in real time and adapts to a child's input.
Talking with AI could shape children's brain development and social connections in unknown ways.
Chatbot use — especially among young children — is still new. There are no long-term studies on its impact, but we do know a lot about how screen time and tech use affect child development.
The amount of time kids spend on devices is disrupting or arresting other important developmental milestones, Scott Kollins, psychologist and chief medical officer at family software company Aura, told Axios.
"We've seen that with older kids. And with kids between zero and five, their brains are developing faster, and they're hitting these super important social milestones more frequently."
Interacting with AI chatbots, Kollins warns, has "the potential to be even that much more disruptive" — but right now, "it is all conjecture in terms of this specific type of interaction."
What they're saying: Interaction with generative AI could "fundamentally change the human brain," says Dana Suskind, a pediatric physician and expert on early childhood and early language development.
Suskind says teenagers and adults are already forming relationships with AI companions. The same could happen with younger kids.
"The content and experience that kids are exposed to in early years isn't just sort of changing things the same way social media impacted adolescent brains," Suskind told Axios. "It is actually changing the foundational wiring of the human brain."
"Children naturally anthropomorphize," Suskind wrote in an email, "but with responsive AI, we're entering uncharted territory for how this might shape their developing sense of reality and relationships."
Between the lines: Some child development researchers worry that chatbots could reshape how children learn trust, empathy and connection.
A small study from 2024 showed that kids ages 3-6 were more likely to trust a robot than a human, even when that robot had proven to be less reliable than the human.
Trust is a particularly thorny problem for those who rely on AI, since many researchers argue that these tools might always be prone to making things up.
Chatbots also tell people what they want to hear.
They're trained to please, which means they're unlikely to say "no" — a word that small children need to learn to deal with.
"It changes the way that kids learn about the cadence and the natural progression of interaction with others," Kollins says. "That's a problem if [young kids] don't learn how responding in a certain way or broaching particular kinds of topics might be met with certain reactions."
The other side: AI can make up stories, answer questions or generate elaborate images at the whim of a creative child.
Many parents are already using chatbots to ease the stress of parenting, including helping to satisfy kids' boundless curiosity.
Amazon's smart home devices — now with Alexa+ boosted AI — come in styles aimed at the youngest users and promise that "kids can create unique stories they dream up with Alexa."
Some early studies show that when children engage in story-based dialogues with AI, rather than just listening passively, they learn more vocabulary and comprehend content better.
In some cases, researchers found these gains were comparable to those from human interactions.
Kollins says that as adults our responsibility to provide our young children with all the information and content that's meaningful or stimulating will be reduced, and that's not all bad.
"Why should [our children] rely just on this narrow sliver of what dad knows, versus the universe of content?" Kollins says.
Yes, but: AI interactions may crowd out important human interactions and activities for young children.
CNN tech reporter Samantha Murphy Kelly wrote in 2018 that because she used Amazon's voice assistant so often, "Alexa" was among the first four words her toddler understood.
Some scientists also worry that even if AI tools do benefit some kids, those gains could just deepen existing educational disparities.
"The one thing that makes us uniquely human," Kollins says, "whether it's for younger kids or even for older kids, is just the entire range of non-verbal communication... subtle facial expressions and body language... that you miss when you're in front of a screen."