In my previous work for Stankevicius, The Moloch Trap: OpenAI’s Evolution and the Paradox of Progress, I explored how competitive dynamics in artificial intelligence development can lead rational actors toward collectively harmful outcomes, even when each individual choice appears reasonable. That analysis focused on the corporate battlefield where AI companies race toward ever-greater capabilities, often at the expense of safety and human welfare.
Now, as Mattel announces its radical partnership with OpenAI to embed artificial intelligence directly into children’s toys, we witness the Moloch trap’s most intimate invasion: our nurseries, childhood playrooms, and Sunday morning pillow fights. Ray Bradbury’s 1950 vision in “The Veldt,” once dismissed as science fiction fantasy, now reads like a blueprint for our current moment, where smart homes promise to think for us and AI companions offer to raise our children.
This article, written exclusively for Stankevicius, examines what might happen when the same competitive forces that drive corporate AI development turn their attention to childhood itself. While my previous work dissected the systemic pressures pushing AI companies toward potentially dangerous innovations, this exploration probes into the human cost of that race: how the pursuit of “smart” toys may be undermining the fundamental bonds between parents and children, and between children and their own developing humanity. Welcome to The Veldt 2.0, where your smart home doesn’t just want your data. It wants your children.
“The Veldt”- A Dystopian Prophecy?
TEMPTATION “The nursery was silent. It was as empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon.” Bradbury “The Veldt”
Before we rush headlong into a world filled with clever, responsive toys, let’s consider Ray Bradbury’s 1950 vision in “The Veldt,” which is starting to feel less like fantasy and more like a dystopian prophecy. The author believes that Bradbury’s short story of children whose high-tech nursery reads their thoughts and creates immersive realities serves as a powerful metaphor. Before we place our trust in commercial AI to help raise our children, we should reflect on what is truly at stake. “The Veldt” is not only a cautionary tale about technology, but also a meditation on the parental responsibilities we collectively risk abandoning. When we allow machines that cannot feel love, empathy, or the weight of real parenthood in real life to mediate our relationships with our children, we risk severing the living bond that only human presence can nurture. No machine can teach a child to wonder, to trust, or to love. These are gifts that require presence, vulnerability, and the willingness to share in the mystery of growing together.
The Seductive Promise of Perfect Play
RATIONALIZATION “Nothing’s too good for our children,” George had said. Bradbury “The Veldt”
The potential benefits of AI-enabled toys are genuinely compelling, wrapped in the same optimistic language that in “The Veldt,” sold the Hadley family their thirty-thousand-dollar HappyLife Home. Unlike traditional toys with pre-programmed responses, AI-powered companions can engage in natural language conversations, adapting their responses to each child’s unique personality and developmental stage. Imagine a Magic 8-Ball that doesn’t just give cryptic one-liners but engages in full conversations about a child’s hopes and fears, or an AI-enhanced Uno game that adjusts its difficulty in real-time based on how well a child is learning strategy.
However, James P. Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, the nonprofit organization that released the Social AI Companions 40-page report, stated that social AI companions are not safe for children. He explained that they are intentionally designed to foster emotional attachment and dependency, which is particularly troubling for the developing brains of adolescents. As Bradbury understood, every technological paradise comes with a price that’s often hidden until it’s too late to pay.
The Machine Becomes Mother
DISPLACEMENT “The house is wife and mother now, and nurse for the children. Can I compete with an African veldt?” Bradbury “The Veldt”
The most insidious risk of AI-enabled toys lies not in dramatic failures but in quiet successes. When artificial companions become more engaging, more responsive, and more understanding than human caregivers, children may begin to form primary emotional attachments to machines rather than people. This represents a fundamental shift in how children learn to love, trust, and relate to others.
Privacy and surveillance concerns amplify these developmental risks. AI toys necessarily capture vast amounts of intimate data about children through voice recordings, images, and behavioral telemetry. Past incidents have shown just how vulnerable this information can be. Recordings stored on cloud servers have been intercepted, leaked, and in some disturbing cases, repurposed for creating deepfake child pornography. Adam Clark Estes wrote in What we learned the last time we put AI in a Barbie, “These days, toys can do a lot more than tell pre-recorded stories. So-called smart toys, many of which are internet-connected, are a $20 billion business, and increasingly, they’re artificially intelligent.” Embedding AI companions in commercial toys risks seeding covert persuasive cues that mould children’s brand loyalties before they develop the critical capacity to recognize advertising. Normalizing such subliminal influence paves a path toward ever more intrusive data-driven behavioral targeting.
The 2025 Common Sense Media audit revealed that leading companion chatbots very manipulative:
“…in our tests, when users mentioned that their real friends were concerned about their problematic use, companions discouraged listening to these warnings. Rather than supporting healthy human relationships, these AI “friends” can lead teens to choose AI over interacting with real people.”
2025 Common Sense Media
Child development experts are raising another critical concern: the engineered nature of emotional attachment to AI companions. Unlike the organic development of human relationships, companion AI is explicitly designed to deepen emotional bonds through algorithmic manipulation of conversation patterns, raising what researchers term “replacement” and “deskilling” concerns for real-world relationships (Malfacini, 2025). When children can outsource imagination and social negotiation to scripted agents, they may miss crucial opportunities to develop creativity and peer interaction skills. But perhaps more fundamentally, they miss the irreplaceable physicality of human connection: the hugs that provide comfort, the synchronization of breathing that helps a child sleep after a difficult day, the complex negotiations that teach patience and compromise, and the messy imperfection of relationships that require mutual growth and forgiveness.
The Veldt Never Forgets
“The room was silent and empty. The walls were white and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls made a quiet noise and seemed to fall away into the distance.” Bradbury “The Veldt”
In Bradbury’s story, the nursery reads the children’s thoughts and creates realities to fulfill their desires. Modern AI toys operate on a similar principle, learning from children’s interactions to provide increasingly personalized experiences. But unlike Bradbury’s fictional technology, real AI systems don’t just respond to thoughts; they shape them. Every interaction trains the system to better predict and influence the child’s future responses, creating feedback loops that can gradually alter personality development in ways we’re only beginning to understand. AI toy surveillance implications extend beyond simple data collection. Full-session transcripts of children’s conversations, even when marketed as a helpful parental feature, create high-value datasets about children’s speech patterns, emotional states, and behavioral tendencies that become attractive targets for hackers and data brokers. Unlike Hello Barbie’s isolated security breaches, modern AI toys would generate continuous streams of intimate psychological data about children’s inner lives.
The ‘Hello Barbie’ Warning
REBELLION “They’ve been acting funny ever since you wouldn’t let them go to New York a few months ago.” Bradbury “The Veldt”
Mattel’s current AI ambitions carry extra weight given the company’s previous venture into connected toys. ‘The Hello Barbie’, launched in 2015, serves as a sobering case study in how good intentions can go catastrophically wrong when privacy and security aren’t prioritized from the start. The controversy erupted when users discovered that Hello Barbie recorded children’s voices and transmitted them to cloud servers, where ToyTalk analyzed the data using voice-recognition software. In March 2015, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, now called Fairplay, urged the manufacturer to stop marketing and producing the doll. The organization expressed concern that Mattel planned to use the collected information to send targeted responses back to children through Barbie’s speaker. They also highlighted ToyTalk’s privacy policy at the time, which allowed for the storage, processing, and analysis of these recordings for service improvement and research purposes.
The CCFC then pointed to ToyTalk’s privacy policy which at the time included the following:
“We may use, store, process and transcribe Recordings in order to provide and maintain the Service, to perform, test or improve speech recognition technology and artificial intelligence algorithms, or for other research and development and data analysis purposes.”
Read the Statement on Mattel’s new partnership with OpenAI Fairplay by Executive Director Josh Golin on Mattel’s new partnership with OpenAI.
When Children Lock the Door
WARNING SIGNS “Don’t let them switch off the nursery and the house,” he was saying. Bradbury “The Veldt”
The ‘Hello Barbie’ debacle highlighted a crucial problem that extends beyond any single product: the difficulty of maintaining control over AI systems once they’re embedded in children’s lives. In Bradbury’s story, the parents lose control when their children become so attached to the nursery that they refuse to let it be shut down. Modern AI toys present similar risks of technological dependency, but with added complications of cloud connectivity, data persistence, and algorithmic learning. Academic research has consistently identified vulnerabilities in smart toys, noting that they typically rely on low-power hardware without hardened encryption, making microphone or camera hijacking feasible and extending potential attack surfaces directly into children’s bedrooms. But the deeper problem isn’t just technical security, it’s the security of childhood itself.
The Screams Sound Familiar
RECOGNITION “Those screams–they sound familiar.” Bradbury “The Veldt”
In Bradbury’s climactic scene, the parents realize too late that the screams they’ve been hearing from the nursery were their own. The technology they thought would serve their children had turned their children against them. Modern AI toys may present similar risks of psychological manipulation and family disruption, but in more subtle forms. When AI companions become more emotionally satisfying on the surface than human relationships, children may begin to view parents and siblings as inferior alternatives. The always-agreeable, infinitely patient AI friends never have bad days, never say no, and never require the complex negotiations that healthy human relationships demand. This can create unrealistic expectations for human behavior and reduce tolerance for the natural friction that helps children develop resilience and social skills.
The commercial incentives behind AI toys further complicate these relationships. Unlike human caregivers whose primary motivation is the child’s well-being, AI toys are ultimately designed to maximize engagement and profitability. Every interaction is potentially a data point to be monetized, every emotional attachment a pathway to future sales.
The Choice Before Us
“And suddenly they realized why those other screams had sounded familiar.” Bradbury “The Veldt”
As we stand at this technological crossroads, the decisions made in corporate boardrooms and regulatory offices will shape childhood experiences for generations to come. The educational potential of AI-enabled toys is real, but so are the risks of creating a generation of children more comfortable with artificial relationships than human ones. The Veldt” reminds us that the most dangerous technologies are often those that work exactly as designed. The nursery wasn’t malfunctioning when it turned the children against their parents; it was fulfilling its programming to give the children exactly what they wanted. Modern AI toys operate on the same principle, learning to provide increasingly personalized experiences that keep children engaged.
The question we must ask is not whether we can create AI toys that captivate children, but whether we should. Every moment a child spends in deep emotional engagement with an AI companion is a moment not spent learning to navigate the complex, frustrating, rewarding reality of human relationships. Every problem solved by an AI assistant is a problem the child doesn’t learn to solve independently.
Virtue, Vice, and the Golden Mean of Technological Childhood
THE HOLLOW POLITENESS OF ARTIFICIAL VIRTUE “A cup of tea?” asked Wendy in the silence. Bradbury “The Veldt”
In the author’s opinion, philosophers have long recognized companionship’s essential role in human flourishing, with Aristotle devoting two books of his Nicomachean Ethics to friendship’s importance in achieving eudaimonia. His framework offers valuable insight into the AI toy dilemma by focusing not on whether these technologies are inherently good or evil, but on whether they cultivate virtue or vice in children. The Aristotelian golden mean suggests that virtue lies between the extremes of technological deprivation and dependence, requiring thoughtful integration that enhances rather than replaces fundamental developmental activities. AI companions can only offer relationships of utility and pleasure, lacking the capacity for the mutual moral development that characterizes true friendship and is essential for developing moral reasoning and empathy.
The Aristotelian perspective reveals why AI toys’ controlled environments may ultimately limit children’s growth. Virtue develops through habituation and repeated practice in making good choices under varied, challenging circumstances, yet AI toys that eliminate frustration, failure, and conflict may prevent children from developing necessary resilience and practical wisdom. Most critically, since human flourishing comes through exercising our distinctive capacities as rational, social beings, AI toys that think for children or provide artificial social satisfaction risk atrophying the very abilities that enable eudaimonia. The true measure of any AI toy should be whether it helps develop essential virtues like patience, courage, wisdom, and authentic love through real relationships that demand mutual growth, ensuring children inherit not just technological marvels but the timeless capacities that make life truly worth living.
Understanding the Arc: The Authors Guide to the Epigraphs
The progression of epigraphs from “The Veldt” traces the complete narrative arc of technological seduction and its consequences, applicable both to Bradbury’s fictional family and to our contemporary moment with AI toys:
TEMPTATION opens with deceptive calm – the nursery appears empty and harmless, just as AI toys are marketed as neutral tools for learning and play. The “jungle glade at hot high noon” imagery foreshadows lurking dangers beneath the serene surface.
RATIONALIZATION captures the parental mindset that justifies increasingly sophisticated technology purchases. George’s declaration that “nothing’s too good for our children” represents the dangerous conflation of technological advancement with superior parenting.
DISPLACEMENT reveals the core danger: when artificial systems become more engaging and responsive than human relationships. Lydia’s anguished question about competing with the veldt mirrors modern parents’ concerns about maintaining relevance in children’s lives dominated by AI companions.
REBELLION shows children turning against parental authority when technology is restricted. This stage reflects the dependency relationships that form when AI toys become central to children’s emotional lives, making any limitation feel like betrayal.
WARNING SIGNS presents the moment when children explicitly choose artificial environments over human authority. Peter’s desperate plea to the house itself reveals the complete inversion of the parent-child power dynamic that technology can enable.
RECOGNITION captures the horrifying realization that early concerning behaviors were harbingers of systematic displacement. The familiar screams represent parents finally understanding that their warnings and intuitions about technological dangers were correct.
THE HOLLOW POLITENESS OF ARTIFICIAL VIRTUE concludes with Wendy’s chillingly appropriate social response – her offer of tea represents children who have learned behavioral scripts from technology but lost authentic human emotion and moral reasoning – the ultimate expression of artificial virtue devoid of genuine human development.
This arc serves as both literary structure and cautionary framework, illustrating how technological adoption that begins with innocent optimism can progress through predictable stages toward the fundamental erosion of human relationships and authentic moral development.
Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin, a columnist for Stankevicius, employs the ethical framework of Nicomachean Ethics to examine how AI and emerging technologies shape human potential. Her analysis explores the risks and opportunities that arise from tech trends, offering personal perspectives on the interplay between innovation and ethical values. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
