On: 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.