New article time! Children, Toys, Parents and Emotional AI

Part of ongoing Lab work on children and emotional AI, Andrew McStay and Gilad Rosner teamed to consider the social acceptability and governance of emotional AI in children’s toys and other child-oriented devices. Open access paper here, published with Big Data & Society.

This entailed expert interviews and survey work, finding generational unfairness to be the key theme of the interview stage. They followed interviews with a UK-wide national survey of parental attitudes towards “emotoys.” This explored the acceptability of emotoys and use of emotional AI in child-focused technologies, and by what terms use of these intimate technologies in toys should be governed. It revealed ambivalent attitudes and, when interpreted in context of literature on technology, ethics and parenting, highlights a need to protect parents as well as children.