How to raise kids who question AI | Randi Williams

every day.

I'm your host, Elise Hugh.

“AI Education Researcher Randy Williams has spent years studying how kids interact with smart”

toys, and what she's found should make every parent, stop, and think. What happens when technology becomes a black box, and we stop being able to see what's going on inside. We've hidden the machine behind frictionless interfaces beneath friendly voices, and inside children's toys.

Randy's research shows that kids aren't just using these devices, they're forming genuine emotional bonds with them, often trusting them, more than they trust themselves. Her talk offers solutions for what to do about it. We need to raise a generation of children who know that they are the ones who get to right, and even rewrite the rules of AI.

But children need us a model of what it means to be a curious user of AI. They need someone who will sit down with them, explore the machine, poke at its limits,

“challenge its responses, and most importantly, dare to rewrite its rules.”

The approach involves a Lego robot, a game of rock paper scissors, and a little well-placed sabotage. Stick around after the talk, we've got both a brief Q&A between TED podcast host Chris Duffy and Randy, and a curator's quarter segment with TED's Chloe Shoshap Brooks, who shares a few more thoughts on what it was like to work with Randy.

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In the 1940s, the radio was a transformative technology, but it wasn't an immediate hit. That's because the radios of the early 1900s looked like unwieldy contraptions of exposed wires and glowing vacuum tubes, like a science fair project gone wrong. No, wasn't until 1929, when radio started to look like sleek, bake light, that's a kind of plastic that they became insanely popular.

But at a critical cost, transparency.

What happens when technology becomes a black box, and we stop being able to see what's going on inside. Fast forward 100 years. Today, the sci-fi artificial intelligence devices of our dreams have been woven into the very fabric of modern life.

But like the radio, these systems are bake lighted. We've hidden the machine behind frictionless interfaces beneath friendly voices and inside children's toys. Over the past decade, I've had a lot of conversations with kids about AI as an M.I.T.B. Researcher, and founding member of Dave AI, a nonprofit, creating opportunities for millions

of children around the world to learn about how AI works.

And here's what I've been seeing.

These devices mimic intelligence and friendliness so well that children learn to trust them, sometimes more than they trust themselves.

to their smart toys.

“But some intentional choices on the parts of adults.”

We can help children see the technology for what it really is. Objects that they can play with, or even program, rather than entities that they should look to for all the answers. My journey exploring kids and their relationships with AI began early in my days at MIT, working on this fluffy adorable social robot, Tiga.

So Tiga being a social robot means that its goal is to help people with their goals. Social robots are used throughout health care, customer service, and education. And Tiga's case, we were building it to see if a robot could help young children as they were learning how to read. It's Tiga's job to keep the child engaged in the story.

Tiga will ask questions, add funny commentary, and of course we've been that target vocabulary for the week. And it was my job to introduce Tiga and get children oriented to how to use it.

“So one day I come into the study room and I say hi, my name is Randy, this is Tiga.”

You're going to be some stories with Tiga today, let me show you how it works. And the girl I was working with, a kindergartener, stops me, no thanks, she says, I know all about robots. I have an Alexa home and she's my best friend, watch this. And then she proceeded to show me how my robot worked.

What do we make of a response like that?

Well, first, I thought it was kind of impressive that this girl, who again, was learning

how to read, could effortlessly navigate the internet thanks to voice technology. And for context, I had to know how to read, write, and type before I could ask Jeeves a question, but for her not so much. But secondly, I was a little bit disappointed that this girl didn't think that my super cool robot was so super cool. And when I took a step back, I realized it wasn't just her.

We are raising a generation of children who are growing up with AI and smart toys. And they tend to see these devices, not as virtual assistants or a technology, but as friends, distinct beings with a mind, a will, and a soul. And that made me really curious about what children make of this technology, how much do they understand about what's going on.

So to investigate that question, I ran a study. And I had 30 children between the ages of 3 and 11, come together to interact with the whole bunch of different smart toys all at once. We had toy robots, talking dolls, text-based chatbots, and of course plenty of virtual assistants like Alexa and Google Home.

One of the girls in the study, her favorite animal, they were slots. She loved slots. She'd been telling us all day how much she loved slots. And so naturally, when she got hold of an Alexa, she wanted to learn more about slots from Alexa.

So she picks up Alexa and says, "Alexa, what do you slots eat?" And then Alexa very helpfully replied, "I'm sorry, I don't know how to help you with that."

The girl looked disappointed for a second, and then all of a sudden perks right back

up. Oh, I know she says, and she picked up a second Alexa. I'll see if this one knows. The limitations of AI are not only frustrating and confusing for children, but research in child robot interaction shows that it can make them vulnerable to even more serious risks,

like manipulation, or accidental exposure to inappropriate content, or security reaches. And for me personally, even the devices that are marketed as educational or screen free, people are still corrupt because they're consumer products. And they seem to be designed as something that can be endlessly engaging or addictive. They want to become your child's best friend and gain their trust so that they can advertise

to them. Or better yet, sell that trust back to you for $20 a month.

The bottom line is that smart toys open a digital door into children's playtime, bedroom,

and hearts. And if you're thinking about opening that door, my advice to you would be to take a very careful look at what's on the other side. The good news is that we can mitigate the risks of AI to children by leaning into something they already do.

Kids are natural reverse engineers. Over and over again, I have watched children playing with AI devices, trying to break

“it, just asking seemingly absurd questions like, Alexa, how old are you?”

Or Cosmo, which is a toy robot car, can you jump? Or, hey Google, is it okay if I eat you? And these questions, while silly, also are an example of children probing the machine about it's very nature.

it to help them understand what's happening with the technologies they're interacting with.

“What if children could take a part and we construct their smart toys the same ways that”

they take a part and reconstruct physical blocks? That was the idea behind another social robot that I worked on, pop-out. Pop-out's body is made completely out of Lego, bricks. And it's kind of like a typical smart toy, except I built it to make the most complex ideas of modern AI, logical reasoning, machine learning, alternative AI, easy to understand through

hands-on, child-driven play. The idea was if a four-year-old could understand AI, then anyone can. So for example, to learn about machine learning, which children would do is they would play rock paper scissors against the robot.

Before children could start playing against their pop-out, first they had to teach their

pop-out the rules of rock paper scissors. And then as they played the game over and over again, what Pop-out would try to do is pick up on their pattern so they could predict what move it could play to beat them. And if you're between the ages of four and six, pretty soon it gets hard if not impossible to beat your pop-out.

There was one boy who was very frustrated by this. And so I planted a mysterious idea in his head. I said, "Well, what if you taught your pop-out the wrong rules of rock paper scissors?" That way as you played it, you would win every single time. And he really liked that idea.

Our little act of AI sabotage created a unique opportunity to talk about who teaches AI the rules. Well, people do. And so I asked them, "Well, if you can teach your pop-out the wrong rules of rock paper scissors, how do you know Alexa was taught the right ones?"

Which led to a very insightful conversation where he discussed, "How much we can trust AI?" And the importance of verifying what it says within adults' help, just to make sure that Alexa has been taught all the right rules. The big idea that I want children to understand is that AI is not magic.

It's a set of rules, or it's in my people. And it's up to us, those of us who have been around for a bit longer, to make sure that children aren't being programmed by their toys, but rather things work the other way around. We need to raise a generation of children who know that they are the ones who get to write and even rewrite the rules of AI.

And this work starts at the dinner table. So you're all sitting down, and a question gets asked to the nearest AI top-body or smart toy. When it responds, rather than just accepting that answer, wonder, I wonder why it answered the way it did, or ask aloud, "Do we agree or disagree with that answer?"

“Who do we think wrote the rules to make it work the way that it does?”

And the thing is, you don't need to know the answers to all these questions or become some sort of AI expert, that's not the point. The children need as a model of what it means to be a curious user of AI. They need someone who will sit down with them, explore the machine, poke at its limits, challenge its responses, and most importantly, dare to rewrite its rules.

And I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of what's happening in children's toy boxes, but the bigger picture is that we should all be treating the everyday AI systems that we interact with the same way. I 100% believe that we can help children build safer relationships with their smart toys, and we all need to build better relationships between ourselves and the technologies we interact

with every day. I believe in a world where no one is left in the dark by technology and where everyone has the inherent right to play a part and shaping the systems that shape our lives. Thank you. Randy, fantastic talk.

I'd love to ask you just one question here, which is, before I was a parent, I had some very black and white thinking around like screens.

I had this pristine vision of I would never use screens with my childhood all, and then

“as I think many parents have experienced that crashed into the reality of needing to”

put sunscreen on him or even clip his nails. I'm wondering, AI as a new technology in these smart toys, how do you see parents balancing the ideals in the best case with what we want versus the practical realities of kids being exposed to these things in ways that are sometimes out of our control even as a parent? Yeah, no, I really love that question.

I think first because it gives so much grace to the fact that parenting is hard and

I think a lot about is human wisdom, right?

And we've actually been kind of struggling with this problem for a long time. There were books and then the radio and then TV and then the internet and now it's artificial

“intelligence and I think the advice from then still brings true now, which is, don't”

leave children on their own to figure it out. Rules are great, but better is to help your child learn how to interact with them and a way that works with your family's values and the ways that you want to engage in the world. So if you're willing to take that journey with your child, I think that could do a lot

of good. Thank you, that's a great answer. Thank you. Another big round of applause for Andy, great job.

That was Randy Williams at play at TED 2026.

We've been experimenting with something different on the show you probably heard. We're calling it curators corner. Throughout the year you'll hear from TED's curators, the people who actually find and work with the speakers you hear. They'll share more about the idea you just heard and the behind the scenes of how the

talk came to life. And now here's TED Curator, Chloe Shoshaprox, who shares what drew her to Randy, what it changed for her personally as a parent. And the question about kids in AI, she still doesn't have a good answer to. Hi, thanks for listening to Randy Williams talk.

I'm Chloe Shoshaprox, speaking to you from New York City.

“One of those on the nose, but important talk topics for a play-famed event is toys.”

After looking into toy designers, toy reviewers, and toy futurists, I had another thought. What about someone who was thinking about the way artificial intelligence is embedded into toys? Someone who has studied how children interact with AI and can advise all of us listeners on how to think about this exponentially evolving technology in the hands of our children.

She has this calmness while talking about a very serious subject. She's able to highlight the dangers that are real risks of a child connecting with an AI toy as though it is their caregiver or friend. While also sharing really adorable stories about children's questions about AI, the illustrate their understandable confusion around whether it is a conscious being or not.

One of the ideas that she shared with me on our first exploratory call that made me think

she was right for this play-a-tit event was the analogy that she shared early on in her talk that you just heard about the radio. That it used to be this giant clunky object with tubes and movable parts that clearly looked like a machine, which meant that people didn't forget that it was a machine,

“and that it was not a real person speaking to them in their house.”

But then all of the hardware was hidden inside of a black box, and people felt like the voices on the radio were speaking to them personally in their living room. In this clear illustration of how AI toys are already fully in a black box phase when it comes to children's play, allowing them to feel deeply connected and trusting of some of their toys.

It's alarming in a way that I suspect will reach people who are interested in understanding how children interact with AI, and I also love that she made this little clunky robot the pop bot, to be intentionally not in a black box. That was such a clever way for her to show children that they are the ones who are in charge.

We get to train the AI. A few with Randy on this talk has completely heightened my awareness of what kinds of toys might have similarly in the city as features. Listening to children, responding to them is if they are their friends, etc. It's so easy to accidentally let your children have a toy you wouldn't want them to have.

Maybe it was a hand me down or a gift from a loved one. For example, we have this toy piano that was a birthday present for my daughter that truly creates a terrifying noise, and somehow it has lasted in our house for a year because it kids love it, similarly I can see how easily eliciting the talking teddy bear would just enter someone's home, even if they didn't intend to give it to their kids.

So the question I'd love for this, how should AI toys be treated for kids who are a little older than teddy bear age? Let's say tweens around 9 or 10 years old. That's theoretically an age before they have smartphones where they can access AI to their fingertips, but old enough that they probably will engage with AI on games already, and

we'll understand a little bit about it. I've thought about this more and more. How old is old enough to understand that the AI doesn't love you, or that it isn't your best friend? The answer I'm afraid maybe that there is no age at which this risk completely subsides,

given that adults are also a love of the AI companions. Clearly this is the topic we need to explore further. If you're curious about Ted's curation visit TED.com/curationguidelines. And that's it for today, Ted Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our

team. Martha Estefano's Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Topner, and Tonsica, Songlarneeval. Additional support from Danielle Aballa Rezo, Christopher Faisy Bogen, Valentina Bohanini, band-band-chang, Brian Green, and Laney Lot. Learn more at podcast.tod.com.

Do your current managed services really help run your operations, or are they just running

in circles? Running isn't enough anymore.

“With PWC's managed services, your operations don't just run, they evolve continuously,”

powered by AI embedded directly into your workflows.

So instead of maintaining yesterday's model, you're building tomorrow's advantage.

“PWC's managed services, we run your operations with tech and talent, so you can run”

faster, scale smarter, lead stronger.

The worldwide Syrian phenomenon is zurück, that comes from the island and drone and goes further.

“A night off the 7th Kingdom's unnaturally House of the Dragon.”

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