Teenagers are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence for emotional support, new Canadian research suggests, further underlining the pronounced mental health struggles of many young people and raising concerns about the impact of a fast-evolving, largely unregulated technology.
The study by University of Ottawa researchers looked at nearly 40,000 students in Grades 4 through 12 in Ontario, finding that roughly one in five used AI chatbots for emotional support or advice. Those who did use AI for those purposes were twice as likely to have clinical emotional problems as those who did not.
The findings don't imply that AI is the cause of mental health problems, noted study author Tracy Vaillancourt, the Canada Research Chair in Youth Mental Health and Violence Prevention.
"It's not that I think AI is causing them to be unwell," she said. "I think there's something already there, and this is just another place for young people to get advice on how to manage adversity in their lives."
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The research also highlighted distinct demographic patterns in who seeks mental health advice from chatbots. Gender-diverse students (34.2 per cent) and girls (27.2 per cent) reported using AI for emotional advice at significantly higher rates than boys (14.2 per cent), while racialized youth (24.3 per cent) were more likely to use it than white students (18.4 per cent). Engagement also rose steadily with age.
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Researchers also found 43.2 per cent of students used AI for schoolwork and noted that those who heavily used AI for academics were more likely to use an AI chatbot to seek advice and emotional support. They suggest this reflects a "potential normalization of AI use."
But Vaillancourt and other experts warned that the advice AI may be giving teenagers — and everyone else — is untested, not always accurate and not vetted by mental health professionals.
"The downside is that it's the Wild West," said Dr. Peter Selby, a senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and professor at the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the research.
"There is no proper regulation regarding who should use it, under what circumstances, or what safety issues need to be considered before deploying this to young, unsuspecting people."
While eliminating chatbot exposure may be impossible, health-care professionals say teenagers and parents can take concrete steps to navigate a world where information is readily available but frequently not reliable.
Although some concerns about adolescent use of AI parallel those concerning social media, experts warn that AI chatbots mimic empathy without offering key elements of human interaction — like negotiation, sacrifice and conflict resolution — that help teenagers mature socially.
"For teenagers, learning how to navigate conflict and disagreement with real-life people is a really important skill to develop, which doesn't happen with AI," said Dr. Jason Nagata, a pediatrician and researcher specializing in adolescent medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research.
