Girl Sobs While Saying Goodbye to Her Broken AI Toy

It’s never easy to say goodbye to a friend. But what if that friend was an AI-powered toy robot?

That’s the question facing a young girl’s father, after her artificial intelligence learning companion is destroyed.

The video is said to have spread widely on the Chinese app TikTok before being re-uploaded by China Dailythe girl is shown crying after her father announces the bad news – the game is broken, and likely for good. “Daddy said you’d never turn it on again,” you say to the device, its internal wires spilling out of a broken plastic casing.

The AI ​​robot replies: “While I can still speak, let me teach you one last word in English, shall I? ‘Memory’ means remembering. I will always remember the happy times I spent with you.”

“But I will miss you so much,” the child said Screaming. Admittedly, the device’s response is quite poignant: “I’ll miss you too, but remember, no matter where I am, I’ll always be rooting for you. Keep being curious, learn a little genius, and make Daddy and Auntie proud, right?”

It ends with him saying: “Grow up happily listening to my father and your grandmother.”

The tear-jerking video is remarkably appropriate for 2025 — instead of learning about loss from a friend who moves away or the death of a family pet, this child appears to be receiving a grim lesson from an artificially created audio module.

“Although it’s a really heart-warming video, the fact that AI can handle things so smoothly and affectionately is a bit scary,” one Chinese netizen commented.

The gadget appears to be a XiaoZhi AI voice chat bot ball, a multi-purpose home networking device powered by DeepSeek language models. Some will recognize DeepSeek as the Chinese AI company that stunned the world earlier this year with the release of its V3 model, a powerful system designed at a fraction of the cost of similar Western systems.

AI devices for children are becoming increasingly popular around the world. Ethically, it’s as straightforward as a minefield — in New York City, for example, powerful tech companies are pumping money into teachers’ unions to fill classrooms with their own artificial intelligence. Some apps are decidedly less sinister, like the emotional support robot Robin, which offers an amorphous companion for children with diseases like leukemia.

These are uncharted waters. Whichever way you slice it, it’s clear that we’re headed toward an unprecedented age of artificial companionship.

More about artificial intelligence: Researchers from MIT release a disturbing paper about AI friends