It’s not just chatbots. Fictional characters are also an addiction for younger people. Parents don’t know how their children use AI.
As part of a new study that will be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, a team of researchers interviewed seven teenagers and thirteen parents about their use of AI (artificial intelligence) and perceptions of technology.
Furthermore, it also analyzed thousands of posts on Reddit of other teenagers.
The results demonstrate that parents have no idea how their children use AI. Most older people believed that their children used technology essentially for information search purposes. And that’s not true.
Most young people admitted to using technology as a way of obtain emotional support, for therapeutic purposessays In addition, young people use AI not only to have a virtual “friend”, but also
“It’s a very hot topic, with many teens talking about Character.AI and how they are using it,” wrote the study’s lead author, Yaman Yufrom the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in .
In fact, the epicenter of youth-oriented AI is the Character.AI, an online service that hosts personalized chatbots. Many of them imitate popular characters from video games and anime, while others are explicitly romance-oriented.
In recent times, the service has been the target of several criticisms, and is even the target of a lawsuit for lack of moderation in conversations with young people after a teenager while talking to a character.
“I realized that I spend too much time with Character.AI”, said one of the teenagers. “I would like to be able to talk to my classmates at school.” On Reddit, researchers even found comments from young people who commented not being able to deal with their suicidal thoughts without help from technology.
Parents had no idea about this situation: eight of thirteen adults said their only exposure to AI was through using ChatGPT (also mentioned a lot among young people) and none of them had used CharacterAI.
“AI technologies are evolving very quickly, as are the ways people use them,” said study co-author, Yang Wangfrom UIUC, no press release.
“There are some things we can learn from past domains, as addiction and inappropriate behavior on social networks and online games.”
