Three in 10 American teens use AI chatbots every day, but safety concerns are growing

the Pew Research Center chest a He studies Tuesday shows how young people are using both social media and AI-powered chatbots.

Teenage online safety has remained a hot topic globally, and Australia is getting ready to take action duty A Block social media For under 16 years starting Wednesday. The impact of social media on teens’ mental health has been widely discussed, and some studies have shown how Online communities It could get better Mental healthwhile other research shows the harmful effects of Death scroll Or spending A lot of time connected. The US Surgeon General even Named Social media platforms placed warning labels on their products last year.

Pew found that 97% of teens use the Internet daily, and about 40% of respondents said they are “online almost constantly.” While this is down from last year’s survey (46%), it is much higher than the results from a decade ago, when 24% of teens said they were online almost constantly.

But as AI-based chatbots become more widespread in the United States, this technology has become another factor in the Internet’s influence on American youth.

A Pew study found that about three in 10 American teens use AI chatbots every day, while 4% say they use them almost constantly. Fifty-nine percent of teens say they use ChatGPT, which is more than twice as popular as the next two most widely used chatbots, Google Gemini (23%) and Meta AI (20%). 46% of US teens say they use AI chatbots at least a few times a week, while 36% report they don’t use AI chatbots at all.

Pew research also shows how race, age, and class influence teens’ chatbot use.

About 68% of black and Hispanic teens surveyed said they use chatbots, compared to 58% of white respondents. In particular, Black teens were twice as likely to use Gemini and Meta AI than white teens.

“Racial and ethnic differences in teen chatbot use have been striking (…) but the underlying reasons for these differences are difficult to speculate on,” Michelle Favreau, a Pew research fellow, told TechCrunch. “This pattern is consistent with other racial and ethnic differences we have seen in teens’ technology use. Black and Latino teens are more likely to say they are on some social media sites — like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram — than white teens.”

Across all Internet uses, Black teens (55%) and Hispanic teens (52%) were nearly twice as likely as white teens (27%) to say they are online “almost constantly.”

Older teens (ages 15-17) tend to use both social media and AI chatbots more than younger teens (ages 13-14). When it comes to household income, about 62% of teens living in households making more than $75,000 a year said they use ChatGPT, compared to 52% of teens below that age. But using Character.AI is twice as popular (14%) in homes with incomes under $75,000.

While teens may start using these tools for basic questions or homework help, their relationship with AI-powered chatbots can become more complex. Addictive and potentially harmful.

The families of at least two teens, Adam Ryan and Amory Lacey, have sued OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, for its alleged role in their children’s suicides — in both cases, ChatGPT gave the teens detailed instructions on how to hang themselves, which was tragically effective.

(Open I Claims It should not be held liable for Ren’s death because the sixteen-year-old allegedly circumvented ChatGPT’s security features and thus violated the chatbot’s terms of service; The company has not yet responded to the Lacey family’s complaint.)

Character.AI, an artificial intelligence-powered role-playing platform, is also facing scrutiny for its impact on teens’ mental health; at least Two teenagers He died by suicide After having long conversations with AI chatbots. We ended up starting to make the decision Stop offering chatbots to minorsInstead, it launched a product called “stories” for underage users which is very similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure game.

The experiences reflected in lawsuits against these companies make up a small percentage of all interactions that occur on ChatGPT or Character.AI. In many cases, conversations with chatbots can be incredibly benign. Based on OpenAI data only 0.15% of active ChatGPT users Conversations about suicide every week — but on a platform with 800 million weekly active users, that small percentage reflects the more than 1 million people who discuss suicide with a chatbot weekly.

“Even if[AI companies’]tools aren’t designed for emotional support, people are using them that way, and that means companies have a responsibility to adjust their models to serve user well-being,” Dr. Nina Vasan, a psychologist and director of Brainstorm: Stanford’s lab for mental health innovation, told TechCrunch.