Approximately 12% of US teens rely on AI for emotional support and advice

AI chatbots are becoming part of the lives of American teens, according to a report released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.

The most common uses of AI in this demographic include finding information (57%) and getting help with schoolwork (54%), but teens also use AI to fill roles typically filled by friends and family. 16 percent of U.S. teens say they use AI for casual conversations, and 12 percent use AI chatbots for emotional support and advice.

While some teens may find comfort in talking to chatbots, mental health experts are wary. General-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok are not designed for such use, and in the most extreme cases, these chatbots can have life-threatening psychological effects.

“We are social creatures, and there are certainly challenges in that these systems can become isolated,” Dr. Nick Haber, a Stanford University professor who studies the therapeutic potential of LLM, recently told TechCrunch. “There are many examples where people use these tools but are no longer grounded in external facts and interpersonal relationships. The result can be significant isolation, or worse.”

Pew’s research also shows a discrepancy between teenagers’ self-reported AI usage and how involved they think their parents are with AI technology. Approximately 51% of parents reported that their teens use chatbots, and 64% of teens reported using chatbots.

While a majority of parents approve of their teens using AI to find information (79%) or get help with schoolwork (58%), far fewer parents approve of their teens using AI chatbots for casual conversation (28%) or to get emotional support or advice (18%). In fact, 58% of parents do not consent to their children using AI for such purposes.

AI safety is a controversial topic among big tech companies, to say the least. However, one popular chatbot maker, Character.AI, has chosen to disable the chatbot experience for users under 18 years of age. The decision follows public backlash and a lawsuit filed over the suicides of two teenagers after lengthy conversations with the company’s chatbot. Meanwhile, OpenAI has decided to retire its particularly sycophantic GPT-4o model, sparking a backlash from those who relied on it for moral support.

The majority of teens have used AI chatbots in some way, but they have mixed feelings about the impact this type of technology has on society. When asked how they think AI will impact society over the next 20 years, 31% of teens said the impact will be positive, while 26% said it will be negative.