Hasbro is turning Optimus Prime and Mr. Potato Head into AI-powered voices — which is one sure-fire way to ruin our childhood memories | Tech Radar
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Hasbro is turning Optimus Prime and Mr. Potato Head into AI-powered voices — which is one sure-fire way to ruin our childhood memories
Endless AI conversations could strip away some of what makes them iconic
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Hasbro has joined the growing list of companies convinced that everything people love should eventually become an AI product. The toy giant has announced Sixth Wall, a new AI studio designed to remake its famous characters into interactive AI experiences in partnership with AI voice platform Eleven Labs.
Hasbro has created a whole new category of product approval for the project called Behavioral Licensing, which aims to preserve not just how characters look, but how they think, speak, and interact. Optimus Prime, Megatron, Cobra Commander, Mr. Potato Head, and characters from Clue are among those being transformed into AI-powered personalities for everything from customer service to games and theme park experiences.
Hasbro says it wants to provide an authorized alternative to the countless unofficial AI character clones already appearing online, and this is a logical solution to the unauthorized AI versions of fictional characters already spreading across the internet with wildly inconsistent results. Rights holders naturally want more control over how their intellectual property is used, and Hasbro deserves credit for trying to compensate performers while establishing guardrails around character behavior.
At the same time, this announcement feels like a textbook example of technology companies mistaking possibility for demand. A great many AI projects are being built because they can exist rather than because anyone is actively waiting for them. The arrival of AI-powered Mr. Potato Head lands squarely in that category.
The difference between a character and a chatbot
One of the defining assumptions of the AI boom is that conversation automatically improves everything. Search engines, productivity software, and anything else that can hold an LLM are AI chatbots now. But beloved fictional characters and chatbots serve very different purposes. One exists to tell stories. The other exists to answer prompts. There's overlap, but it's hardly identical.
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Optimus Prime may have been created to sell toys to kids through cartoons, but he became popular because the writers, artists, and performers behind the character transcended that commercial origin in the eyes of fans.
AI systems change that relationship. Written scripts are replaced with an endless stream of dialogue. The character shifts from a hero in a story to an overly available Cameo service. The legendary Autobot has nothing better to do than make small talk.
Mr. Potato Head is an even stranger example because his appeal was never built around conversation in the first place. The toy became a classic because children could rearrange it endlessly, creating goofy faces and ridiculous combinations that felt unique every time. Its charm came from imagination and physical play, not from hearing the character deliver an unlimited stream of AI-generated dialogue.
The character has survived for generations precisely because he is simple. A plastic potato with detachable eyes, ears, and a mustache does not need to be a witty conversationalist, no matter what the Toy Story movies claim. The more Hasbro tries to transform that simplicity into a sophisticated digital experience, the greater the risk that it forgets why people loved the toy in the first place.
Plenty of AI developers have become fascinated with accessibility and personalization while overlooking the appeal of limitation. Some experiences are meaningful precisely because they are not available every minute of every day. A favorite character benefits from a little distance and, for kids especially, an imaginary personal idea of the character.
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There is also a practical issue. AI models remain surprisingly unreliable custodians of fictional personalities. They can mimic tone, vocabulary, and mannerisms impressively well, but they often drift in subtle ways. A sentence here and a response there can slowly transform a recognizable character into a generic approximation of itself.
Fans are sensitive to those differences. The details matter because the details are often the entire point. Hasbro says it is using authorized source material, working with professional performers, and focusing initially on experiences aimed at people aged thirteen and older. Compared with many AI initiatives announced over the past two years, this effort appears unusually thoughtful.
Initial commercial value, though, may be an illusion if it reduces the emotional value of these characters. People rarely revisit childhood favorites because they want a more practical version of them. Expanding those characters into endless AI interactions risks diluting some of what made them special in the first place.
Supporters of AI character experiences will argue that every new technology inspires similar concerns. History certainly provides examples. Television did not destroy books, video games did not destroy movies, and streaming did not destroy television. New formats often coexist with old ones.
The difference is that most successful entertainment technologies created new experiences rather than endlessly extending old ones. Sixth Wall is betting that consumers want deeper and more persistent relationships with familiar characters.
Hasbro may discover a successful business in AI personalities. It may even create a few genuinely entertaining experiences along the way. But maybe invest the money in new and better quality toys and stories instead.
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Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for Tech Radar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He's since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as Open AI’s Chat GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he's continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.
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