'My son genuinely believed it was real': Parents are letting little kids play with AI. Some believe AI can spark their child's imagination through personalized stories and generative images. Josh was at the end of his rope when he turned to ChatGPT for help with a parenting quandary. The 40-year-old father of two had been listening to his "super loquacious" four-year-old talk about Thomas the Tank Engine for 45 minutes, and he was feeling overwhelmed. "He was not done telling the story that he wanted to tell, and I needed to do my chores, so I let him have the phone," recalled Josh, who lives in north-west Ohio. "I thought he would finish the story and the phone would turn off."

'Let's talk about something fun!' Grem the AI chatbot toy. 'Let's talk about something fun!' Grem the AI chatbot toy. 'I love you too!' My family's creepy, unsettling week with an AI toy The cuddly chatbot Grem is designed to'learn' your child's personality, while every conversation they have is recorded, then transcribed by a third party. It wasn't long before I wanted this experiment to be over ... 'I'm going to throw that thing into a river!" my wife says as she comes down the stairs looking frazzled after putting our four-year-old daughter to bed. To be clear, "that thing" is not our daughter, Emma*. It's Grem, an AI-powered stuffed alien toy that the musician Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes, helped develop with toy company Curio. Designed for kids aged three and over and built with OpenAI's technology, the toy is supposed to "learn" your child's personality and have fun, educational conversations with them. It's advertised as a healthier alternative to screen time and is ...

Student engagement is one of the key challenges in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) education. Tangible learning approaches, such as educational robots, provide an effective way to enhance engagement and learning by offering real-world applications to bridge the gap between theory and practice. However, existing platforms often face barriers such as high cost or limited capabilities. In this paper, we present Curio, a cost-effective, smartphone-integrated robotics platform designed to lower the entry barrier to robotics and AI education. With a retail price below $50, Curio is more affordable than similar platforms. By leveraging smartphones, Curio eliminates the need for onboard processing units, dedicated cameras, and additional sensors while maintaining the ability to perform AI-based tasks. To evaluate the impact of Curio on student engagement, we conducted a case study with 20 participants, where we examined usability, engagement, and potential for integrating into AI and robotics education. The results indicate high engagement and motivation levels across all participants. Additionally, 95% of participants reported an improvement in their understanding of robotics. Findings suggest that using a robotic system such as Curio can enhance engagement and hands-on learning in robotics and AI education. All resources and projects with Curio are available at trycurio.com.

A glimpse toward this future is beginning to emerge in products like Grok, an AI-powered plush toy in the shape of a rocket that can converse with your child. Grok is the first product from a Silicon Valley start-up called Curio that is partnering with OpenAI on a line of toys Curio's founders say will be capable of long-running, fully interactive conversation, allowing a child to view it almost as a peer or friend.

In a year where Kate Bush and Metallica re-entered the charts, it's fitting that 2022's most intriguing game so far has been plucked from the past. Directed by Takashi Tokita of Chrono Trigger fame, for decades Live a Live appeared destined to remain the RPG that time forgot. Its initial Japanese release on the Super Famicom (SNES) in 1994 was a commercial flop, ensuring it never left its homeland – until now. Resurrected for Nintendo's fittingly anachronistic current console, the Switch, this eyebrow-raising relic has been reanimated using Square Enix's gorgeous 2D-HD engine, a graphical style that melds rich high-definition backgrounds with retro 16-bit sprites. The results are glorious, injecting once-flat environments with a playful, eye-catching charm that never quite loses its magic.

The Swedish musician and AI enthusiast known as Supercomposite used an AI to create hundreds of creepy new tarot cards -- and has been blasting them on Twitter for days, in a delightful barrage of occult-flavored machine learning. The artist is using an AI called Looking Glass, which debuted last year and was made by Twitter user ai.curio. Some cards have humanoid characters with holes for faces, some feature monstrous-looking creatures in bloody shades of red, and some are creepy simply because they seem uncannily like tarot cards at first glance. These tarot cards do not exist. I generated 500 of these and I'm not stopping.

It is hard to argue when a video game is truly bad, whatever its relative merits. A broken game is rife with glitches, freezing or falling to pieces when you play it. And ungainly controls or horrible graphics might make it even more unpleasant. But now and then, as in the film world, even games that are terrible can become popular. Sometimes a train-wreck of a video game can deliver something that no well-produced blockbuster can: the element of surprise.