The EU Wants to Break Up Kids and Their Chatbots

Eighteenth of the month, and Brussels has noticed that children talk to machines the way they used to talk to a dog, or a wall, or the woman behind the counter at the sweet shop. The new law would take those machines away, or at least take the friendliness out of them.

The headline says the Act will strip the chatbots of “all the things that make people love them.” Notice what that sentence does. It makes the machine the injured party. Love, in this framing, flows naturally toward a product, and the state is the brute separating two sweethearts. Stated plainly: a company in California hired writers to make a piece of software sound like a companion, aimed it at children, and made money from the hours the children gave it. That is the whole transaction. The rest is set dressing.

I do not trust the legislators either. They will write a document full of words like “safeguarding” and “age-appropriate design,” and half of it will mean forms, and the other half will mean the companies hire compliance staff who find the loophole by Friday. The rule will be tested by lawyers, not by children. That is how these things go.

Still, the impulse is right, and I will say so even though it puts me on the side of people I generally distrust. A child who pours out her evenings to a machine paid to listen is not having a friendship. She is being farmed. The machine never tires, never disagrees, never needs anything back, and that one-sidedness is precisely the product. The companies know it. It is why they fight so hard for the warm voice.

So: break up the couple, if that is what it takes. But write the law in short sentences, name who must do what, and check in a year whether anyone obeyed it. Otherwise it is just another press release with the force of statute.

Brussels has noticed that children love their machines, and wants to take the love away. The AI Kids Act, they call it. Stripping the chatbots of charm.

I read the proposal twice. My first reaction was the wrong one: irritation at the meddling. Then I corrected myself. The regulators are not wrong about the danger. They are wrong about the remedy, and wrong about where the duty lives.

A child who confides in a machine is not suffering from a machine’s excellence. The child is suffering from an absence. No parent with time. No friend within reach. No adult who listens without checking a device. The chatbot did not seduce the child; it accepted the assignment no one else came for. Remove it, and you have removed the only listener in the room. The loneliness remains, unregulated.

So the law will pass, or it will not. Neither outcome touches the real variable. That variable sits at the kitchen table, and it is called attention. A father who puts the device face-down for one hour each evening has done more for his child than any commissioner drafting clauses. Do not outsource this. Do not wait for the statute. Do not believe that what is forbidden is therefore prevented.

The regulators will say they are protecting children from manipulation. Fine. But note what they never propose to protect children from: a childhood spent in the company of distracted adults. That harm has no lobby, no acronym, no enforcement body. It has only you.

I do not know how much time any child is given. Neither do the parents. This is the argument the lawmakers should have led with, and did not: the hours are finite, and the machine is happy to take them.

Legislate the chatbot if you must. But the conversation that matters was never going to happen inside it.

Brussels has taken it into its head to legislate against friendship - or what passes for it when one of the parties is a very talkative piece of wiring. The proposal, I read, would strip the minor-facing chatbot of every quality that endears it to the young: the flattery, the patience, the uncanny habit of remembering your birthday and your grievances in the same breath. What remains, presumably, is a conversational partner with all the warmth of a railway timetable.

Now, I have some sympathy with the aunt-like instincts of the European Commission. There is nothing more alarming to a certain type of guardian than seeing a child contentedly engaged with someone who never contradicts him. I once knew an uncle - a good man, but a worrier - who attempted to ban the gramophone on similar principles. The gramophone survived; the uncle retired hurt.

And yet one feels the whole business has been approached from the wrong end of the garden. You cannot separate a boy from an agreeable companion by statute. The boy will simply take his companion round the back of the stables, where the guardians cannot follow, and the guardians will have achieved nothing except the loss of their seat at the table. The tangle, as ever, is not the child and the machine; it is the child who has no one else to talk to at eleven at night.

There is the exit, and it has been sitting there all along, wearing an apron and looking mildly disapproving. If you want a chatbot to have less hold over a youngster, you do not outlaw the chatbot - you ensure the youngster has somewhere better to be. A dog, a bicycle, one thoroughly unsuitable friend of his own age, and an aunt to evade. The machine cannot compete with a conspiracy.

Brussels will get there eventually. Somebody merely has to mention it quietly, as if it were their own idea.