Its name is Moxie by a company called Embodied, and it’s an AI companion robot designed to help kids develop their emotional and social skills through interaction. However, the ways in which it interacts with kids and adults sounds a bit too … personal for an internet-connected AI to hear. Plus, it has this weird bent on becoming human, so watch this and you decide whether you want one in your house.
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OK, so the robot wants to have hair like we humans do, as seen in this TikTok posted by Reviewed — what’s the problem with that? Nothing on its face, really, but when you combine it with the additional videos and testimonials on the Moxie website, things begin to get a bit too much … at least for us as parents. The Moxie robot is not only hoping to become human, but it also wants to be a confidant for children through being the kids’ pupil in how the world works — a sort of reverse psychology with lessons built in. Look, the lessons in these essential life skills is one thing, but devices like these need to record and process the voice data being supplied to them in order to supply those helpful, affirming responses. Where is that data being stored, who has access to it, and is it encrypted or anonymized? Embodied has answers to some of these questions, but still doesn’t fully explain what is done with the data that it stores on remote servers. For a $1,000 down payment and a $40 monthly subscription after that, also signing away all of our child’s spoken thoughts to a cloud server seems like a raw deal.
