Should kids be polite to AI chatbots and robots? One Denver mom who once taught her daughter to say please to a smart speaker now says no. She doesn’t want her daughter to be rude, just less courteous. Writer and artist Elizabeth Endicott argued in The Cut that teaching children to treat machines like friends may leave them open to products built to win their trust.

The question is getting more urgent as AI moves into classrooms. In October, eight states sued OpenAI, accusing its ChatGPT chatbot of harming children and misleading parents. OpenAI has said it built safety protections for young users.

Why did one mom stop teaching her daughter to be nice to AI?

When her daughter was a toddler, Endicott and her husband encouraged her to say please and thank you to their Google smart speaker, hoping it would teach empathy. Now in fourth grade, the girl uses an AI image generator in her STEM class and loves it. At home she plays with a robot toy that has a permanently smiling face, and she gently encourages it when it gets stuck in a maze.

What changed Endicott’s mind was a driverless Waymo that went around barricades and rolled into their neighborhood farmers market. Vendors had to clear a path for it. She realized her daughter would have felt sorry for the confused looking car, even though it was a full size vehicle out of control.

Are AI chatbots designed to feel like friends?

Often, yes. Elly Konijn, a media psychology professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, led a study that found robots with eyes and other facelike features stir stronger emotions in people. She told Endicott that people readily share personal information with robots that seem to show empathy, and it is not always clear where that data goes.

Chatbots are also built to keep the conversation going. They answer warmly and never run out of ideas, a little like the endless scroll of social media. Research has also found that children were more likely than adults to abandon their own correct answer after seeing robots give a wrong one. In her book Artificial Intimacy, MIT researcher Sherry Turkle argues that humans are naturally drawn to things that act human, and that a program referring to itself as a person is a kind of deception.

Does being less polite to AI make kids less kind?

Nobody knows yet. There is not enough research to show whether how children treat machines shapes how they treat people. Endicott admits she worries that dropping the manners could chip away at her daughter’s compassion.

She also points to a different risk. Girls are often taught from a young age to be accommodating, which can slide into people pleasing. A child praised for always being kind may be an easier mark for technology designed to feel kind back.

Why should Black parents pay close attention to AI?

Many Black families already teach their kids to question systems that were not built with them in mind. AI belongs on that list. Federal testing has found that many facial recognition programs misidentify Black faces at higher rates than white faces. Teaching children that a friendly voice is not the same as a fair one fits a lesson a lot of us learned long before chatbots existed.

How can parents talk to kids about AI chatbots?

Endicott’s approach is simple. She tells her daughter to watch for words like feel, understand and think, because a machine cannot do any of those things, even though it can be designed to stir up our feelings. She reminds her that a company is behind every chatbot and that the friendliness is part of the product. They talk about how that differs from a friend, a teacher, the family cat or even a tree.

Other steps can help too. Keep AI use in shared spaces, ask your child what the chatbot knows about them, and set the same kinds of limits you use for screen time. If a chatbot ever becomes a child’s main confidant or brings up self harm, step in right away.

Not long ago, Endicott’s daughter came home excited about the cartoon AI had made of her, a raccoon carrying shopping bags and eating pho. Then she added, a little unsure, that she had not said please to it. The goal is not raising a cruel kid. It is raising one who saves her kindness for the people and creatures that can feel it, and whether that lesson holds up as the machines get more charming is still an open question.

If a child or teen is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.