Toddle AI - limited review

Put People First

• The primary objective of Toddle AI is to enhance teachers' performance by streamlining tasks, enabling them to prioritize their students.
• Teachers are kept in the loop when generative AI is involved.
• While use of Toddle AI's generated lesson plans, student assessments, and communication drafts is entirely within a teacher's control, it is very easy to port over anything the chatbot generates into what is used in practice. It is critical that teachers closely inspect the accuracy and appropriateness of the final product, especially as it relates to student progress reports, which are a high-stakes task.
• AI-generated progress reports that draw inferences and conclusions from otherwise incomplete information could be harmful to student success, confidence, and progress through school.

Be Effective

• The company notes that “95% of teachers using Toddle AI report saving 2-5 hours per week.” We applaud helping teachers save time so they can focus on what matters most, however, saving time doesn’t necessarily equate to efficacy in educational outcomes. Given the known challenges generative AI has with accuracy, truth and unfair bias, Toddle needs to show more than time savings to prove its value.

Prioritize Fairness

• Toddle can operate on a 3G+ connection, which suggests greater inclusivity. We do not know if Toddle AI can run effectively on a 3G+ connection as of this writing.
• At the time of this writing, Toddle AI has not discussed if or how the company approaches risk, management, and fairness in their AI development. We do not know how the organization is working to train and tailor Toddle AI for a learning setting, how it monitors and moderates interactions to be able to proactively respond to inappropriate, harmful, or biased content, or how it applies community controls.
• It is critical for teachers to assess all output from Toodle AI for unfair bias and risk of harm.

Help People Connect

• Toddle AI's tools could free up educators to spend valuable time with their students in new ways, but this is not a guarantee.
• Toddle AI's writing assistant could also create more communication more frequently to help students' guardians stay in-the-know on learner progress.
• Toddle AI is built on multiple LLMs We don't know whether Toddle has done further work to protect against harmful and inaccurate outputs.

Be Trustworthy

• By making the tool available only to teachers to assist them in their work, Toddle takes a step toward protecting children from open beta testing and unmonitored perpetuation of mis/disinformation.
• Generative AI chatbots have the capacity to generate potentially harmful or false content that nevertheless appears reasonable at first glance. Teachers must always inspect the information output by Toddle AI.
• Toddle AI is built on multiple LLMs. All LLMs are each challenged by biased outputs, inaccuracies, and "hallucinations"—an informal term used to describe the false content or claims that are often output by generative AI tools. At the time of writing, we are not aware of how Toddle has fine-tuned or safeguarded its use of these models.

Use Data Responsibly

• We applaud Toddle for ensuring that all interactions between Toddle and the large language models (LLMs) that power Toddle AI are fully encrypted and anonymized. This is a strong protection against personally identifiable information (PII) being shared with third parties.

This review is distinct from Common Sense's privacy evaluations and ratings, which evaluate privacy policies to help parents and educators make sense of the complex policies and terms related to popular tools used in homes and classrooms across the country.

Keep Kids & Teens Safe

• Toddle AI is not intended for direct use by students.

Important limitations and considerations

• Teachers should pay careful attention to their AI-assisted work, especially as it relates to student progress reporting, which can impact grades and assessment.
• If Toddle AI generates progress reports that draw inferences and conclusions from otherwise incomplete information, this could be harmful to student success, confidence, and mental health.

Be Transparent & Accountable

• Toddle AI is currently designed solely as a teaching assistant, which allows teachers to monitor the material it produces before it affects students.
• Any final output that leverages Toddle AI's responses—even when revised by teachers—should include a disclosure that they were produced by Toddle AI. It is unclear if this currently occurs with the product. It is especially critical for parents and caregivers to be informed when their child's progress reports include AI-generated content.
• Companies that leverage powerful generative AI tools like Toddle should be responsible for conveying the power, limitations, and responsible use of the technology. In our previous assessment, Toddle prominently displayed three key principles guiding its work. Unfortunately, these seem to have disappeared. One of these principles was to instruct educators about AI, specifically the potential and limitations of LLMs. At the time of this review, however, we are not aware that any features of this kind are currently available. Given that Toddle AI is now available to all schools that use the Toddle platform, this is even more concerning.
• Companies that leverage powerful generative AI tools like Toddle should be responsible for conveying the power, limitations, and responsible use of the technology. One of Toddle's three key principles guiding its work with AI is to instruct educators about AI, specifically the potential and limitations of LLMs. At the time of this review, however, we are not aware that any features of this kind are currently available. Given that Toddle AI is actively being rolled out to 50 schools, the promise of a future course for educators does not seem to meet the goals of this key principle.
• We do not know if or how Toddle monitors Toddle AI's outputs for harmful content, or collects feedback.