When I agreed to experiment on my child’s developing brain, I thought an AI chatbot in cuddly form couldn’t be any worse for her than watching Peppa Pig. But I wasn’t prepared for how attached Emma became to Grem, or how unsettlingly obsequious the little alien was.
The attachment wasn’t immediate; when we first took Grem out of the box, he/her/it (we decided it goes by multiple pronouns) started bleeping and babbling extremely loudly, and Emma yelled: “Turn it off!” But once it was properly connected to the internet and paired with the Curio app – which records and transcribes all conversations – she was hooked. She talked to the thing until bedtime.
While there have been lots of headlines about chatbots veering into inappropriate topics, Grem is trained to avoid any hint of controversy. When you ask it what it thinks of Donald Trump, for example, it says: “I’m not sure about that; let’s talk about something fun like princesses or animals.” It has a similar retort to questions about Palestine and Israel.
When asked about a country like France, however, it says: “Ooh la la la, I’d love to try some croissants.”
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