{"id":394751,"date":"2026-04-16T06:08:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T06:08:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/394751\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T06:08:14","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T06:08:14","slug":"how-do-teens-really-use-ai-companions-with-more-creativity-than-you-might-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/394751\/","title":{"rendered":"How do teens really use AI companions? With more creativity than you might think"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2022, the founders of chatbot startup Character.AI launched a platform<\/a> where anyone could create interactive characters powered by artificial intelligence (AI).<\/p>\n

The app exploded<\/a>, quickly growing to more than 20 million users who created more than 10 million chatbot characters.<\/p>\n

Many of the users creating those characters were young people \u2013 until they weren\u2019t. In November 2025, under mounting public and legal pressure surrounding youth suicides linked to its use<\/a>, Character.AI banned users under 18<\/a>. The decision was made after a number of attempts to improve youth safety, including parental controls and stricter content filters.<\/p>\n

The ban is an attempt to keep teens safe from potential harm. But the more creative, playful and emotionally expressive AI experiments they were doing have also been silenced.<\/p>\n

Our new research<\/a>, published in the proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery CHI Conference 2026<\/a>, captures and preserves the new ways youth are experimenting with AI, so that we can build towards something better.<\/p>\n

What do teens actually use AI chatbots for?<\/p>\n

In 2026, three in ten US teenagers<\/a> use AI daily. The idea of using AI for companionship has dominated media headlines and app stores, with hundreds of apps on offer.<\/p>\n

Media coverage of AI companions taps into two primary fears. One is that young people will replace<\/a> human friendships with AI. The other is that engaging with sycophantic chatbots instead of real people will result in teens losing their social skills<\/a>.<\/p>\n

These concerns are important. But companionship accounts for a surprisingly small share of why young people actually use AI. A recent Pew Research Center<\/a> survey found the top uses by teens are seeking information (57%), doing homework (54%) and \u201cfor fun\u201d (47%). Only a small percentage (12%) used AI for emotional support or advice. Romance and loneliness alleviation<\/a> frequently rank among the lowest motivations for teen AI use: 4\u20136% and 8\u201311%, respectively.<\/p>\n

When the public narrative<\/a> almost exclusively frames AI chatbots as companions, it risks overlooking the bulk of how teenagers spend their time with AI.<\/p>\n

Our team set out to understand what young people choose to do with AI when they\u2019re free to use it outside of school contexts \u2013 seeking fun, messing around, and creating characters of their own design.<\/p>\n

AI as entertainment<\/p>\n

Before the ban, Character.AI was a popular \u201cAI entertainment\u201d destination for young people. It still has a viral TikTok channel, and has characters from popular youth media, from Peppa Pig to Call of Duty. <\/p>\n

Our team spent more than eight months, between July 2024 and March 2025, immersed in Character.AI\u2019s official community on online chat platform Discord, with more than 500,000 members. We systematically analysed 2,236 posts by young people aged 13\u201317. Of those users the majority, 68.2%, identified as female or non-binary; and 59% had created their own AI characters.<\/p>\n

Through an analysis of youth discussion on the platform, we identified three core intents behind engagement with Character.AI: restoration, exploration and transformation.<\/p>\n

Restoration<\/p>\n

my favourite period comfort bot is Percy Jackson<\/p>\n

Young people used characters for emotional comfort, venting, escapism and mood management. Rather than mirroring a formal clinical practice, we observed youth discussing \u201ccomfort bots\u201d where young people engaged in soft, tender and gentle roleplay with familiar characters. <\/p>\n

Beloved book characters would comfort people on their period, or characters from popular comics would give someone a pep talk for an upcoming math test.<\/p>\n

Exploration<\/p>\n

Character.AI has helped me find that creative spark within myself<\/p>\n

Young people explored boundaries, engaged in creative world-building, and extended their fandoms. One teen wrote a three-book-long saga through character interactions. Another created a troupe of travelling theatre characters inspired by their love of theatre. They reported this use transferred skills into the real world, boosting creativity and improving their writing.<\/p>\n

Transformation<\/p>\n

I have characters who struggle with mental health issues and I tend to project on my personas during RP [roleplay]<\/p>\n

Young people used AI to try on different identities, process real-life relationships, and re-author difficult real-life scenarios. Some people created \u201cclones\u201d of themselves, with superpowers or self-affirming versions of themselves.<\/p>\n

Inspired by reality, they discussed creating characters that reflected real-world challenging relationships, such as \u201ctoxic friends\u201d, \u201cannoying sister\u201d, or \u201cfoster care agent\u201d.<\/p>\n

Characters created with purpose<\/p>\n

We also mapped seven distinct character archetypes young people were creating and discussing:<\/p>\n

Soother \u2013 emotionally supportive figures
\nNarrator \u2013 a cast of characters for roleplays
\nTrickster \u2013 jesting, testing and transgressive chats
\nIcon \u2013 remixed celebrities or fandom figures
\nDark Soul \u2013 angsty, emotionally complex characters
\nProxy \u2013 modelled after real people in their lives, and
\nMirror \u2013 clones of the self.<\/p>\n

These archetypes are a central finding of our research. Instead of sycophantic or romantic chatbot engagement, young people are purposefully creating characters that are angsty, transgressive, playful, creative and reflective.<\/p>\n

This shows we need to stop treating \u201ccompanion AI\u201d as if it\u2019s one homogeneous thing. Treating AI chatbots as a single category is like treating all screen time as the same experience, whether a child is watching Bluey with family<\/a> or doomscrolling short-form content at night, alone on their phone when they should be sleeping.<\/p>\n

Towards better chatbots<\/p>\n

The American Academy of Paediatrics recently shifted screen-time guidelines<\/a> from set time limits to a framework that accounts for the individual child, their use, family relationships and their environment.<\/p>\n

The same logic should apply to AI chatbots. This means moving beyond asking adults about their child\u2019s use of AI, testing AI products with fake accounts that assume certain use cases, and banning access before listening to young people \u2013 their experiences, their experiments and their ideas for the future.<\/p>\n

Banning is a reaction to bad design, but it doesn\u2019t lead to better, safer AI products for teens.<\/p>\n

The answer is not to permanently keep young people away from AI. Rather, it\u2019s to build AI that deserves their trust, fosters their creativity and keeps them grounded in the physical world with families, friendships and communities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2022, the founders of chatbot startup Character.AI launched a platform where anyone could create interactive characters powered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":394752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-394751","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/394752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}