About 12% of U.S. teenagers flip to AI for emotional help or recommendation

AI chatbots have become embedded in the lives of American teenagers, according to a report published Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.

While the most common uses of AI among this demographic are to search for information (57%) and get help with schoolwork (54%), teens are also using AI to fill roles that would typically be occupied by friends or family. Sixteen percent of U.S. teens say they use AI for casual conversation, while 12% use AI chatbots for emotional support or advice.

Some teens may find solace in talking to chatbots, but mental health professionals are wary. General purpose tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok are not designed for such uses, and in the most extreme cases, these chatbots can have life-threatening psychological effects.

“We are social creatures, and there’s certainly a challenge that these systems can be isolating,” Dr. Nick Haber, a Stanford professor researching the therapeutic potential of LLMs, told TechCrunch recently. “There are a lot of instances where people can engage with these tools and then can become not grounded to the outside world of facts, and not grounded in connection to the interpersonal, which can lead to pretty isolating — if not worse — effects.”

Pew’s survey also shows a discrepancy between teenagers’ self-reported AI usage and the extent to which their parents think they engage with this technology. About 51% of parents said that their teen uses chatbots, while 64% of teens reported using them.

The majority of parents are okay with their teens using AI to search for information (79%) or get help with schoolwork (58%), but 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 are not okay with their child using AI for such purposes.

AI safety is a contentious topic among leading tech companies, to say the least. But one popular chatbot maker, Character.AI, made the choice to disable the chatbot experience for users under the age of 18. This decision followed public outcry and lawsuits filed over two teenagers’ suicides, which took place after prolonged conversations with the company’s chatbots. OpenAI, meanwhile, made the decision to sunset its particularly sycophantic GPT-4o model, which sparked backlash from people who had come to rely on the model for emotional support.

Though a majority of teens use AI chatbots in some way, they have mixed feelings about the impact of this kind of technology on society. When asked how they think AI will impact society over the next 20 years, 31% of teens said the impact would be positive, while 26% said it would be negative.