The teens I spoke to about this are savvier than you might expect. Joseph, for instance, says she recognises the AI may just be saying what she wants to hear and takes the advice with caution. But most of them, Joseph included, say using AI for advice or companionship can go too far. Several mentioned the story of a 14-year-old boy who took his own life after obsessive conversations with a chatbot.
“One of my friends, at one point, he talked to AI all the time,” says Kingston Rieban, 16, of San Diego, California. “Sometimes we’d just be sitting and we’d hear him laughing next to us, typing stuff down on his phone.”
When Pew asked US teenagers about AI, 12% said they use it for advice or emotional support and 16% said they use it for casual conversation. Those proportions may be small, but they still amount to millions of children across the US if the survey is representative. And there were huge racial disparities.
According to the study, 21% of Black teenagers use AI for emotional support, compared to just 13% of Hispanic teens and 8% of White teens. (There weren’t enough Asian teenagers in the study to break out a separate analysis.)
“We also see a lot of evidence, using regressions and other analysis, that race does stand out on its own, even when controlling for other factors like income,” says Anderson.
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