Nearly a quarter of 9- to 17-year-olds say they would turn to a chatbot for help with schoolwork or homework before seeking guidance from a trusted adult such as a teacher, counselor, or parent.
That shift signals a growing reliance on AI as a first-stop resource for problem-solving and decision-making among young people.
Those are among the findings in a new report from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that researches and advocates for healthy tech use among youth.
Adolescents are regularly using AI for school and emotional support, the survey found. And kids who struggle with schoolwork and socialization report using AI more frequently.
The vast majority of 9- to 17-year-olds use AI. And of those adolescents, 85% have used AI for schoolwork or homework, with about half of them using it weekly, and a fifth using it daily.
Kids’ are adopting AI far more quickly than they did social media, said Michael Robb, the head of research at Common Sense Media. The report’s findings should be an eye-opener for adults, he said.
“AI is already a part of childhood in a way I think maybe people haven’t really grappled with yet,” he said. “This is not about the future. This is happening right now across different age bands, across gender, across race and income levels as well.”
There are also signs of growing AI-dependency among adolescents, especially among the heaviest users of the technology, the report found. A fifth of kids who use AI say it would be very or somewhat hard for them to give it up for a month, with 42% of kids who use AI frequently saying it would be tough to go without AI.
Kids most often encounter AI through automatic summaries from search engines and from the generative AI chatbot ChatGPT.
Many kids struggling with school and socialization use AI more frequently
The nationally representative survey of 1,204 children ages 9 to 17, conducted in March, offers one of the clearest snapshots yet of how deeply AI is embedded in young people’s daily lives.
Children who say they struggle with academics and focus are more likely to use AI frequently, as are kids who say they are lonely.
For example, 55% of teens and tweens who use AI and find math pretty or very hard say they use AI weekly for schoolwork, compared with 46 percent of adolescents who use AI but don’t find math difficult. More than half of adolescents who say they have a hard time focusing on school assignments indicate they use AI at least once a week for schoolwork.
That trend continues with students who say they feel lonely. Kids who use AI daily were more likely to report feeling lonely at least some of the time compared with kids who use AI less than once a month or not at all. It’s unclear if AI use itself makes kids lonely, or if lonely adolescents are more likely to turn to AI, the report states. The survey is not set up to answer cause-and-effect questions about the trends.
Many young people are also drawing on AI for social-emotional support and practice. Overall, 40% of kids who have used AI have utilized it to practice conversations and social skills. Kids who say they are lonely and kids who say they have a harder time making friends are more likely to use AI in this way than kids who say they are rarely lonely and don’t find making friends hard.
But teens are also using AI as an educational tool. Ryleigh Turner, who did not participate in the survey, is among the nearly 9 in 10 teens who have used AI. Turner, who graduated this spring from high school, said she was at first hesitant to use AI, but she’s since found it to be an indispensable educational resource.
Turner has used AI as a tutor, to research universities and scholarship opportunities, and to help prep for the SAT and ACT.
“While I’m good academically, I struggled with the test taking at first, and so I let [AI] see my [SAT and ACT] results and it created a schedule for me for tutoring,” she said.
Nearly half of adolescents who use AI say they have tapped the technology to get advice on their future goals, the report found. About half of kids also think AI will have an equally negative and positive effect on their near- and long-term futures.
Turner believes AI will be a positive technology for her generation. “There’s much more to it than just cheating on your math homework,” she said.
When it comes to AI, kids need education as well as rules
While three-quarters of kids report that their school or teacher have communicated expectations regarding when students can use AI for schoolwork this year, fewer say that educators or parents have talked to them about using AI safely, or AI’s accuracy.
Fifty-six percent of kids say their school has discussed how to use AI safely, and 51% have been told by a teacher or their school how to judge if information from an AI platform is accurate or trustworthy.
A little more than half of kids, 56%, say their parents or guardians have not spoken with them about AI safety.
That leaves a big gap in their understanding of a technology that is already integrated into their lives, Robb said.
“Schools are starting to set some rules, but they’re less consistent around teaching AI literacy,” he said. “So that’s an area where schools could definitely home in on a little bit more closely.”
At a bare minimum, students should understand that AI doesn’t understand whether the answer it spits out is accurate or not and that it frequently gets things wrong, Robb said. Teachers should also speak with their students about how there are often biases built into AI outputs based on the training data that was used.
Students should also be aware of the privacy concerns experts have over AI, Robb said.
“It’s like giving your diary to AI and hoping for the best, but that becomes part of AI’s training data and can become a privacy risk because you don’t know how that’s going to manifest itself later on within the AI,” he said.
The findings are part of an inaugural survey that Common Sense Media’s newly minted Youth AI Safety Institute plans to conduct regularly. The organization established the institute in May as an independent research and testing group focused on kids and AI safety.
