Barbie does not need change

With the hit of a button, electricity surged through the lifeless body and the figure creaked to life. But the figure was not Frankenstein — it was the new Barbie doll.

Hello Barbie, the new artificial intelligence doll created by the company Mattel, is designed to listen attentively to a child’s questions and ask intimate questions in hopes of helping with moral dilemmas.

Though many childhood dreams of talking to toys become reality with Hello Barbie, hidden dangers abound with the artificial intelligence the doll uses.

One prominent feature of Hello Barbie is that it is able to remember conversations and draw upon that information at a later time. This is made possible by a hidden microphone that transmits everything the speaker says to a server.

It also means that anything a child confides in the doll will be recorded in a database. Though Mattel claims that all conversations with Hello Barbie will be kept private, the company’s databases can still be hacked and the information leaked, as has happened with prominent companies like Target and Home Depot.

Another feature that Hello Barbie brings is its life-like qualities. To adults, the doll may just be a talking piece of plastic, but to children, it may seem like a genuinely close friend.

These synthetic relations can even triumph over real relationships, since Hello Barbie will never talk back or argue with the child. The child may view the doll as the perfect friend and see few reasons to make relationships with others.

Peter Kahn, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington who studies human-robot interaction, told the New York Times that he worries about a ‘‘domination model’’ relationship in which the child makes all the demands and receives all the rewards but feels no responsibility to the robot. This could lead to bad habits and the formation of the wrong mindset.

Because of the limits of artificial intelligence, Hello Barbie’s interactions and lines only go so far and cannot match what a human mind can do. Hello Barbie’s responses are based on determining key words from the speaker's words and picking a response. Given the rudimentary state of artificial intelligence, there are moments when the Barbie doll is oblivious to the message the speaker is trying to send, whereas a human could have easily interpreted the message.

Though Mattel created the new doll with good intentions, Hello Barbie may do more harm than good. The easy solution: Let Barbie be the inanimate doll she has always been. Children will be healthier if they can use their own imaginations rather than interacting with gimmicky fads like Hello Barbie.