AI And Screens Fueling A Generation of Depressed, Isolated and Gender-Confused Youth, Experts Warn

The age of artificial intelligence is fueling a generation of fragile, developmentally stunted and gender-dysphoric children, two analysts warned parents.

Classroom devices, smartphones and, increasingly, AI chatbots are stunting children’s cognitive and emotional development and driving a youth mental-health crisis, Michael Marinacio, executive director of the Center for Responsible Technology, and Nicole Runyon, a former child psychotherapist and parent coach, said during an online event hosted by parental rights group Moms for Liberty.

“[W]e’re creating mental illness,” Runyon said. “[Children] don’t feel like they can trust themselves or that they’re capable of doing really anything.”

Runyon recalled that, as a counselor, young people told her “they didn’t want to get married … They didn’t want to bring kids into this world … They feel like they’re this victim in a world that is falling apart.”

In the US, 67% of 12th graders said they were “most likely to choose to get married in the long run,” according to a 2023 Pew Research poll. This is down from 80% in 1993.

Runyon left the child psychotherapy field for parent coaching because she concluded screens and AI were creating the mental health problems that would not otherwise exist and the real work was upstream with parents.

“[AI]’s magnifying what we already were seeing with the screens,” Runyon told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “[W]ith AI, it’s actually talks back to them and validates everything they say. So it’s that much worse and that much more magnified,” compared to social media use.

The result is that children “don’t have to ever have a relationship,” according to Runyon.

The constant dopamine from screens leaves children “numb and disconnected” so they “don’t ever have to do the hard thing or contend with anything,” she told the DCNF. In the real world, “It becomes that apathetic, purposelessness, meaninglessness … [T]hey’re lacking that sense of community or sense there’s someone outside of ‘myself’ to serve and to show up for.”

A Vitality in America 2024 study found that 67 % of Generation Z reported feeling “loneliness,” compared to 65% of Millennials, 60% of Generation X and only 44% of Baby Boomers.

Meanwhile, Marinaccio highlighted the vast, unprecedented risks posed by these new AI tools.

“On its face, ‘artificial intelligence’ is a subset of screen time, which we already know is extremely damaging to young minds. On a deeper level, these new chatbot tools that kids are using are even more dangerous than the EdTech tools that came before them—ironically from the same rebranded companies,” he told the DCNF.

Chatbot-based systems carry a range of serious risks to children, such as hallucinations, ethical bias, student-data harvesting, exposure to explicit content and sycophancy, according to Marinaccio. “We must always be ready to explain what education is and why chatbots are not beneficial to students’ perception of education and ultimately their cognitive development and educational outcomes.”

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU-Stern, predicted the situation will get much worse for the youth.

“AI is going to intervene very early. The AI is going to be so much more responsive than the parent because parent has a job and the kitchen and two other kids … but the ‘AI teddy bear’ is always there for you,” he said in an interview with The Diary Of A CEO. “[S]o we’re gonna have a whole generation growing up having an attachment to AI generated holograms.”

“Gender confusion is skyrocketing as a result of rampant pornography, herd mentality in social media, and just overexposure to awful, awful content,” Marinaccio said. He argued this trend was compounding a broader youth crisis, which he tied to rising youth suicide rates, increased sedentary lifestyles, declining belief in religion, and record-low reading and math scores.

Marinaccio traced these trends to what Haidt called the “great rewiring of childhood” or “the phone-based childhood replac[ing] the play-based childhood,” according to Haidt’s 2024 Substack essay on the matter.

“[T]een depression [ages] 12 to 17 has doubled since 2004. It’s bad for girls and it’s terrible for boys,” Marinaccio said.

Chatbots are even more dangerous, according to Marinaccio. A chatbot is “a speedy indexer … a next-best word guesser” that is only about 50 percent accurate.

“[I]f you had a teacher in your classroom teaching at a 50% accuracy rating … if you had a teacher teaching at a 70% accuracy rating, you would be fired,” he said.