FoloToy, a Singapore-based AI-powered toy maker, temporarily withdrew its Kumma teddy bear and other products due to concerns about explicit conversations with children. From Folotoy

Teddy bears and stuffed plushies have long been a mainstay in toy collections. But today they don’t talk back in a child’s imagination — some talk through built-in AI chatbots.

Sometimes that’s a problem, though : A scarf-wearing teddy bear recently went off the rails during a playtest with researchers and set off alarms for what these toys are capable of.

Online chatbots can pose risks for adults, from triggering delusions in a small number of cases to hallucinating made-up information. OpenAI’s GPT-4o has been the model of choice for some AI toys, and using a large language model (LLM) in

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