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A new study has found that the unsupervised use of AI by young children increasingly has them involved in bad things that are violent and emotionally harmful.

A new report conducted by the digital security company Aura found that a significant percentage of kids who turn to AI for companionship are engaging in violent roleplays — and that violence, which can include sexual violence, drove more engagement than any other topic kids engaged with.

Drawing from anonymized data gathered from the online activity of roughly 3,000 children aged five to 17 whose parents use Aura’s parental control tool, as well as additional survey data from Aura and Talker Research, the security firm found that 42 percent of minors turned to AI specifically for companionship, or conversations designed to mimic lifelike social interactions or roleplay scenarios. Conversations across nearly 90 different chatbot services, from prominent companies like Character.AI to more obscure companion platforms, were included in the analysis.

Of that 42 percent of kids turning to chatbots for companionship, 37 percent engaged in conversations that depicted violence, which the researchers defined as interactions involving “themes of physical violence, aggression, harm, or coercion” — that includes sexual or non-sexual coercion, the researchers clarified — as well as “descriptions of fighting, killing, torture, or non-consensual acts.”

Half of these violent conversations, the research found, included themes of sexual violence. The report added that minors engaging with AI companions in conversations about violence wrote over a thousand words per day, signaling that violence appears to be a powerful driver of engagement, the researchers argue. [emphasis mine]

You can read the study here. As bad as this data above is, the most frightening aspect of the report is this quote:

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Across the device data, teens 13–17 who spend more time on social media show higher levels of digital stress. The idea comes from the Digital Stress Scale (Hall et al., 2021), which Aura also used in its earlier report on kids’ digital stress. The scale defines five pressures: approval anxiety, availability stress, connection overload, fear of missing out (FOMO), and online vigilance.

Among preteens (8–12), those on social media report nearly 40% more digital stress than peers who stay off. Girls are more active on the platforms where stress is most often reported: 64% use social media, compared with 52% of boys; 57% use AI tools, compared with 41% of boys.

Families are feeling the strain, according to Talker Research. Nearly half believe technology is harming their child’s emotional well-being — 51% cite concerns for girls, compared with 36% for boys. Many are tightening rules at home: 50% set screen-time limits, 64% require approval for online purchases, and 49% withhold devices until chores or homework are done. [emphasis mine]

We should not be surprised by this. This uncontrolled use of AI and its clear negative consequences is merely an extension of the accumulating evidence that unsupervised use of smart phones by young children has a negative impact on their development.

The frightening part to me, however, is the weak response by parents. Only half are convinced this technology is harming their kids, and even those who do believe so are not taking it away from their children, only limiting its use in a variety of superficial and generally ineffective ways.

Humans are tool-makers. We create tools to enhance our abilities. Until recently, those tools always worked to our benefit, making us smarter or stronger or more capable. Even when these enhanced abilities allowed us to destroy ourselves in war with greater efficiency, overall the benefits of the tools clearly outweighed the negatives.

There is increasing evidence that this is not the case with our new digital tools. While they provide us instant access to information, their design is directing us to shallow knowledge that is also increasingly destructive to our ability to think critically. The information is also often confusing, incorrect, superficial, or purely emotional. And these digital tools are numbingly addictive, driving out all other thought processes.

In other words, these digital tools are not making us smarter or better informed. They are making us less thoughtful using a database that is less nuanced or robust.

That’s the negatives we see as adults. The negative influences on children is now found to be even more profound. And yet, we are taking almost no action to fix the problem.

It seems to me that the dark age of foolish emotional madness that seems to be engulfing civilization at this time is only going to get worse.