A complaint I hear a lot from my millennial peers is that our parents didn’t teach us enough about money. I can say that personal finance wasn’t dinner table conversation in my house, and even as I went off to college and started fending for myself, it was almost a taboo subject. When it came to money, people either had it or they didn’t, and you definitely didn’t talk about it. 

Maybe this is why the average American isn’t exactly fluent in personal finance, and the situation is getting worse. Americans can only answer about 50 percent of basic questions about borrowing, savings, and risk on a financial literacy survey, according to a 2026 study by TIAA, a retirement services company. About a third of those surveyed said they have a hard time making ends meet and are debt-constrained. These figures have remained relatively unchanged for nearly a decade, but dropped to their lowest level in this year’s study. 

It makes sense: It’s hard to learn about money when it’s not taught in schools, and it’s such an intensely private topic. It’s also hard to make good financial decisions when you’re one of the growing number of American households struggling to pay bills, repay debts, and save for the future — and feeling very stressed about it.

In a perfect world, each of us could sit down with a financial adviser to get help — but most of us can’t afford that. Instead, average Americans tend to find personal finance tips on TikTok, in Reddit threads, by watching Suze Orman on YouTube or How to Get Rich on Netflix, or by Googling their questions. 

Now we have AI tools, too. 

With access to an internet’s worth of information and financial advice, ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI chatbots can answer any question you ask. They can help you put together a basic budget or, armed with your bank statements and the details of your student loans and your retirement accounts, tailor solutions to your specific situation. Or, at least, that’s the promise.

AI could create a more utopian, more equitable future, where reliable, hyper-personalized advice is just a prompt or two away for people who can’t afford to meet with an expert in real life. But machines are built by people, and there’s good reason to be concerned that these machines will simply replicate the biases and disparities built into our current system.

Here’s what experts say about how to make the most of these tools — and how to think about all of the inherent risks of uploading a lot of personal financial information to a chatbot or, worse, giving an AI agent the keys to your bank account.

The steep rise, risks, and rewards of AI financial advisers

Nearly 20 percent of Americans have used AI tools like ChatGPT for financial advice, and close to 25 percent for Gen Z adults and millennials have tried it, according to an August Gallup poll. These numbers could tick up too: In October, OpenAI started rolling out a dedicated personal finance tool to its ChatGPT Free and Go users in the United States, which effectively means anyone can try it. ChatGPT Finances lets you securely connect your bank account to the tool using a platform called Plaid, and then you can basically have a conversation with the chatbot about your real-time finances down to the penny. It’s like an AI-powered Mint (RIP) that you can talk to directly.

Regardless of where you encounter a chatbot or how much data you give it, experts say these tools could genuinely help improve financial literacy. You can talk to them about money problems you’re too embarrassed to discuss with friends and family, or ask questions and receive actionable, personalized information. There are real upsides to using AI this way.

Taha Choukhmane, an associate professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has been studying outcomes when people turn to chatbots for financial advice. In general, these AI tools give pretty good advice, and that advice gets better as people become more practiced in asking the right question, according to research he published earlier this year. 

“We were actually quite surprised that relative to the status quo, the average American would be better off if they were to follow the advice,” Choukhmane told me. But he added a caveat: “Just following the advice without understanding the advice puts you at risk of not fully understanding the risk.”

But you shouldn’t trust everything a chatbot tells you and should verify everything before making any decisions. 

Chatbot advice has some significant limitations. First, it’s not impartial. The finance industry has a vested interest in steering you toward certain ways of managing your money, and that typically means selling you products, like loans. If you’ve ever searched for personal finance tips on Google, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of the top results come from banks and other financial institutions. This is by design, according to John Campbell, an economics professor at Harvard. But because AI is aggregating all of that advice, the specific influences and possible bias is less obvious. 

“AI is very promising for providing low-cost financial advice in plain English that will arguably be better than what many people would be able to do on their own,” said Campbell, who’s also the co-author of Fixed: Why Personal Finance Is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone. “One caveat is that chatbot advice is quite likely — unless a model has been carefully trained — to reflect the average of whatever’s being posted on the internet, and that may or may not be first-rate advice.”

An example Campbell gives is the question of when to start taking Social Security benefits. While you’re eligible at age 62, many economists agree that you should delay your benefits, which, based on the way the government calculates your monthly payouts, will allow you to enjoy much higher benefits later in life. But paid financial advisers can recommend starting as early as possible, since waiting longer reduces the amount of money that needs to be managed, which reduces the adviser’s fees. That means there’s a lot of conflicting advice online, much of it supplied by the finance industry. And that’s the information used to train AI models.

“The advice is much more mixed,” Campbell said. “And so if a chatbot is learning from that, it may not actually give the best advice.”

It can be hard to recognize bad advice anywhere in life, but especially when you’re talking to a machine that’s programmed to please you. A chatbot could encourage you to consider a balance transfer, to lean in on credit card rewards, or to refinance your mortgage — all decisions with upsides and downsides for you, but definite upsides for banks — without you realizing how much of its training data comes from the finance industry selling these products. What’s worse is that if you do end up taking bad advice, it might be years before you realize it. You won’t know that you refinanced a mortgage at a bad time until a better time comes along.

That leads me to the other major issue with using chatbots for money advice: People who lack financial literacy are the most likely to fall for bad advice, because they simply don’t recognize it as such. They also tend to be less wealthy, which means they can’t afford big mistakes. 

One way to mitigate risk, oddly enough, is to give the AI chatbot more personal information. The more details about your situation it has to consider, the more it can offer personalized advice. More context also means better advice, according to Choukhmane. 

“There’s a trade-off there,” Choukhmane said. “There’s real risk around privacy, and so I think everyone needs to find their level of control.”

Don’t assume your data is safe

Any time you’re talking to a chatbot, you’re putting a lot of trust in tech companies to take care of the personal details you’re sharing. Sending sensitive financial data is an especially risky proposition. While tech companies, including OpenAI, promise to keep your data secure, there’s already a long list of breaches, leaks, and privacy violations that serve as cautionary tales.  

It’s also impossible to know what tech companies might do with your data in the future. Most of them will use it to train their models, unless you tell them not to. Some of them will use the data to serve you personalized ads. 

Then there’s the risk of bad actors getting into your ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini account. If you’ve been using a chatbot for financial advice and uploading your bank statements, a hacker could gain access to a stunning amount of information that could enable them to do all kinds of terrible things to your life. 

“They could steal your identity and open accounts and then quickly bankrupt a person,” said Delicia Reynolds Hand, a senior director at Consumer Reports. “It’s not even so much the primary underlying accounts that could be at risk, it’s more just access to this information.”

The steady march of AI progress is making this situation even more complicated. The previous era of chatbots offering financial advice is quickly bleeding into a new phase of AI agents logging into bank accounts on users’ behalf. If you’re using a tool like Claude Cowork or even an AI assistant like Muse, you can give an agent the login credentials to your bank account, and because the agent is operating its own computer, it can actually make transfers, apply for loans, or really do anything in your account. This is reportedly driving major banks wild, since they don’t know which logins are coming from humans and which are agents. And because we know that AI agents are unpredictable, it’s hard to know how that access might go wrong.

Beyond data security and privacy, you should also be aware of the simple fact that nobody’s really at fault if you end up losing money using these tools. Chatbots are not regulated in the way that human financial advisers, who have a fiduciary duty to act in your best interest, are. 

“If I get bad tax advice from H&R Block or a tax adviser, there are a clear set of rules and guardrails in place to manage what I can expect in that relationship and where the service they use has liability and where that liability ends,” Hand said. “Currently, that’s not the case for these tools.”

Trust but verify — and then delete your data

In the final years of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan popularized an old Russian proverb: Trust, but verify. The phrase is somewhat nonsensical, since trusting someone implies that you don’t need to verify what they’re saying, and verifying what’s said implies you didn’t trust them in the first place. But if you are willing to shoulder a bit of risk, consider approaching AI this way, especially when your life savings are on the line. I’d also suggest adding a coda to the phrase: And then delete your data.

Chatbots are not stand-ins for licensed financial advisers, he said, and you shouldn’t let them make decisions for you.

The great paradox with tools like ChatGPT and Claude is that they’re very good at generating truthy text. It sounds authoritative and looks correct — and usually is. Except when it isn’t. AI is famously unpredictable and prone to hallucinations. You can ask the same question twice and get two different answers. That doesn’t mean these tools are useless. It just means you have to approach them with caution. You have to interrogate these chatbots, challenge whatever advice they give you, and then crosscheck that with other, more reputable, sources. 

“If you’ve never used these tools, I would not encourage you to just change all your financial plans based on your first conversation,” Choukhmane said. “You want to be quite careful. Start using these tools, start understanding, ask a lot of follow-up questions.”

When it comes to mitigating risk, consider giving ballpark figures for your income or spending when you’re talking to a chatbot about your finances. Uploading financial documents, even if they’re redacted, is inevitably filling a tech company’s vault with your sensitive information without necessarily knowing what will happen to it next. You should also dig into your privacy and security settings to make sure you’ve turned on multi-factor authentication and that your personal data is not being used to train AI models and gets deleted after 30 days. 

Ethan Bloch, the product lead for ChatGPT for Financial Services, made a similar set of recommendations when I talked to him recently. Chatbots are not stand-ins for licensed financial advisers, he said, and you shouldn’t let them make decisions for you. They’re designed to inform and help you think through complex topics.

“You should liken it to just talking to a friend who has some very informed opinions about finance,” Bloch told me. “But if you’re actually making some large financial decision — your portfolio or retirement — you still need to seek out the help.”

Regardless of how experienced you are with chatbots or how much data you’re prepared to hand over, remember what Campbell, the Harvard professor, said. If your financial literacy isn’t great, AI chatbots can be trouble. And if you’re like most Americans, you could probably stand to learn a little bit more about things like mortgages and interest rates. 

Yes, Chatbots can be a good way to brush up on financial literacy. You can ask them the money questions you’re too embarrassed to discuss with friends and family. But you can also learn about money the old-fashioned way: Reading books and websites written by reputable, independent sources. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has a portal of financial education resources, including games and quizzes. Khan Academy has a course that covers everything from credit scores to college savings. There’s a personal finance subreddit that I joined years ago and read almost daily. There are budgeting apps, like YNAB which has its own huge Reddit presence. 

Whatever you do to learn more about personal finance, simply doing something is progress. Talking about personal finance isn’t the taboo it once was in the US, and it’s even a required course in the vast majority of American high schools now. And while AI won’t magically solve your money problems, it can help get you started. Just be careful. Your livelihood could be on the line.

If there’s one thing a busy person doesn’t need, it’s more information. More emails, more notifications, more infinite feeds — the steady drip of data spells doom for the overstimulated American. And if you’re a busy parent, like me, sometimes it feels like a flood: school emails, doctor’s appointments, so many little things to buy.

Even things that used to be simple are harder. I recently listed an item on Facebook Marketplace, which quickly meant I was replying to offers and getting ghosted for the better part of a weekend before finding someone who, after a detailed back-and-forth about the most likely place to find a parking spot in my neighborhood, finally took my old baby swing away.

If only I’d had Muse. You’ve probably seen the ads on Instagram promising “AI that gets it done for you.” The new personal AI agent app from Meta can not only automate your Facebook Marketplace tasks, but also sort your emails, manage your calendar, and buy your groceries. And it’s free — unless you’re using it most of the day or you want access to Meta’s most powerful models, at which point it costs $20 or $100 a month. It all sounds, in a word, magical.

Muse is probably the personal AI agent you’ve heard of — and it’s currently the market leader with more than 8 million downloads in its first month, according to one estimate — but there’s now a small army of these bots: OpenAI recently announced Dots, X has Grok Bot, and there’s Instinct, which is currently invite-only and operates entirely in iMessage or WhatsApp. They all offer the same promise: to remove friction from your busy life.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been handing over more and more of my life to AI agents in pursuit of making my life a little simpler. What I found is that AI is unpredictable, and so are AI agents. When I first began using Muse, it started doing things I didn’t ask it to do. It offered to help with random email threads and created dossiers on people in my work meetings. It generated a detailed report on nearby apple-picking destinations based on a calendar invite from my wife. To me, an AI agent doing these things without prompting isn’t helpful. It’s unnerving. 

But ultimately, I came away believing that AI agents can make your life easier. 

That might mean giving an AI agent more access than you’re comfortable with — handing over lots of login credentials and possibly even your credit card. The more you rely on an AI agent, the more you risk outsourcing your decision-making. This raises real questions about how much agency we want to hold onto in our lives — even the tedious parts. 

The leap of faith

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: To make an agent work for you, you’ll have to sacrifice a tremendous amount of privacy and grant it permission to access a lot of personal information. 

Muse and its competitors can do the classic generative AI tricks, like draft emails or make you a fitness plan. If you’d like the agent to send one of those emails, however, you’ll have to grant it permission to access pretty much everything in your Gmail account. If you want it to schedule workouts, it will need access to your calendar. If you want the agent to buy anything on your behalf, it will need your credit card. If you want it to book your doctor’s appointments, it will need the credentials to log into your healthcare portal. The more permission you grant it, the more the agent can do for you, but that also opens up more opportunities for the agent to misunderstand you or your instructions (more on this in a moment). 

This process of sharing your digital life with an AI agent means you’re giving an untold amount of personal information to tech companies, who don’t always behave ethically, and who sell user data for profit. For now, Meta says that it does not share Muse data or conversations with its ad systems, although privacy experts warn that doesn’t really matter since those systems monitor what Muse does on your behalf. Nevertheless, Muse’s early days were filled with security and privacy blunders.

But without all of this info and access, the AI agents aren’t very useful. So if you’re not comfortable letting a bot into all of your accounts, an AI agent is probably never going to be the solution to your digital administrative exhaustion. But even if you are willing to hand that over, there are still other barriers to an agent’s efficiency and effectiveness. 

The blank slate problem

AI agents, like a lot of new software tools (including chatbots), suffer from the blank slate problem. The blank slate problem essentially means that people don’t know how to get started. This might be because you don’t know about the tool’s capabilities, or because you simply don’t know what would be helpful. There might be some trust issues, too.

As with AI in general, we don’t exactly know how AI agents work. That means we don’t know exactly what they can do or how they’ll do it, according to Pattie Maes, a professor of media technology at MIT — so it’s necessary to do a lot of babysitting. “I feel like I’m not gaining a lot of time because I can’t completely trust the system,” Maes told me about her experience with Muse, “and I can’t predict how it will behave and what it will do.” 

Some advice I heard from early adopters of these tools, however, is to start small. “In the beginning, it’s very hard to trust that it’s going to just magically do a really big thing,” Julie Zhuo, founder of the AI company Sundial and an early Facebook employee, told me about her experience using personal agents. “So you give it smaller tasks, and once you see it succeed, then I feel like you develop more trust that it can tackle bigger things.”

This is surely why Meta decided that Muse needed an Ideas tab full of small tasks the AI agent can do. Muse will also send you a lot of push notifications to prompt you to do stuff, like reply to specific emails or prepare for a meeting. That detailed report on apple-picking destinations? That was a notification about something I didn’t ask Muse to do. Muse also sent me a notification about a show hosted by a podcast I don’t listen to and another one with details about a Halloween party I wasn’t invited to, as well as several evening digests that included lists of things it had already bugged me about that day. Notifications are either helpful nudges or time-consuming attention thieves, depending on your worldview. However, if you fall into the latter category and turn off the notifications from your always-on personal agent, you’re inevitably forfeiting some friction reduction opportunities.

This gets to the heart of one of the big questions I have about AI agents: How helpful are they, really, if it’s this difficult to know what to do with them?

These agents worked much better when I drove the conversation. While wondering what to do with my new agents, literally staring at the blank slate, cost me some time, I found myself thrilled at how easy basic productivity tasks became. Adding events to my calendar, making to-do lists and then being held accountable for stuff not getting done, being reminded to reply to an email — it was these kinds of simple, administrative chores where I saw personal AI agents really start to save me time. 

Other tech journalists seemed to have similar experiences. Eli Tan at the New York Times raved about Muse handling a call to his insurance company. Nicole Nguyen saved time by enlisting Dots for help canceling unwanted subscriptions. Allison Johnson at The Verge had Muse do a whole list of “pebble-in-your-shoe annoyances” she’d been putting off, and among other things, the agent succeeded in helping her buy an entire camping kitchen. Still, she wrote something that stuck with me: “the dirty secret of productivity hacks is that doing more stuff often doesn’t feel like things are being removed from your plate; somehow it just invites more tasks.” 

This gets to the heart of one of the big questions I have about AI agents: How helpful are they, really, if it’s this difficult to know what to do with them? There’s a learning curve, sure, where succeeding at one thing gives you an idea to try something else and have some certainty about how well the AI agent will handle the task. But as the notifications roll in, and you spend more and more time texting with a piece of software, how much time are you really freeing up by using these tools? At a point, enlisting an agent with its own computer to do your chores still amounts to using one app to save yourself from using a different app.

The ironies of automation

Even when they have access to a lot of your information, and you’ve come up with some things for them to do, AI agents can be unpredictable. Because despite reading every email in your inbox or scanning every purchase on your latest bank statement, AI agents still can’t read your mind, and you can’t necessarily guess how they’ll interpret your commands. They can misunderstand you and, armed with the keys to your digital life, do some real damage. 

Some people are already learning about the unpredictability of AI agents the hard way. One early adopter, Matt Robb, gave Muse the keys to his Facebook Marketplace account and was surprised when buyers started showing up at his front door ready to pick up their purchase. Muse, without asking Robb, had told them where to go. It turns out, without realizing it, Robb had given the agent permission to do so, and the agent had simply decided that the most efficient way to get buyers to Robb’s door was to give them his home address.

This dilemma is an example of a decades-old set of concepts known as the “ironies of automation.” Identified by psychologist Lisanne Bainbridge in a paper published in 1983, the ironies of automation help explain why things go wrong when humans give a machine too much control. As Vera Liao, an electrical engineering and computer science professor at the University of Michigan who studies human–AI interaction, explained to me: More advanced automation leads to more consequential errors, and the more humans rely on automation, the worse we get at catching those errors. “Even in simple tasks like judging whether AI output is wrong, people consistently accept wrong AI outputs even if they could have gotten it right on their own,” Liao said.

In some cases, like the time Muse read a journalist’s private messages, things go wrong as a result of poorly designed software, but more often than not, it’s the fault of the user who gives instructions that are too vague, giving the agent space to get creative, which isn’t always a good thing.

I had my own misunderstanding with Instinct. In a text message, the agent reminded me about a couple of emails I’d received and prompted me to follow up. When I replied to the text, I asked Instinct to show me possible replies to these emails. The AI agent instead just sent the responses it wrote. I audibly gasped. 

Looking back at our chat history, I could see why Instinct interpreted my instructions that way. I effectively gave the machine too much control and then failed to manage the automation properly. 

Leaning on AI to do your thinking is an example of what psychologists call cognitive offloading, where you employ an external tool to reduce your effort to complete a task. It makes completing the task easier, sure, but you also open yourself to mistakes. In this case, an AI agent took my instructions too literally, and I failed to catch the error. I can only imagine how a small oversight could turn into a cascade of catastrophes that need cleaning up. All it takes is one poorly worded email sent to the wrong person, and you might have hours of explaining to do — all because you were trying to save yourself 30 seconds of writing.

The real world slop

While I was testing all these agents, I talked to a mix of experts and early adopters. Their opinions were decidedly split about whether these tools were useful out of the box, without a ton of oversight and training by the user. The experts, who had all studied AI in academic settings, all brought up the ironies of the automation problem, where AI makes errors that humans can’t catch. And Maes, the MIT professor, pointed at another consequence: By outsourcing so many tasks to agents, we’re actually creating more work for everyone, including the human service workers who have to interact with this technology instead of us.

“There’s just more and more slop,” Maes told me. “We risk, in a world where agents do all the tasks for us, becoming so dependent on them that the world also isn’t created for us to interact with anymore, but it’s only created for our agents to interact with others, with services.” (We’re already seeing versions of how dominant tech platforms can fundamentally reshape real-world spaces: Think of how Starbucks no longer looks like a coffee shop where you can hang out all day, and is instead built and staffed around mobile order pick-up.)

The early adopters were decidedly more optimistic. Matt Van Horn, an entrepreneur who co-founded the ridesharing service that became Lyft, has been tinkering with agents since the craze started late last year. He’s currently telling his friends and family to use Instinct, which he described to me as “the most ambitious and aggressive” AI agent. 

“I’ve been pushy with my mom and my wife,” Van Horn told me, “and saying, ‘Hey, you should sign up for this. It’s magical.’” 

“My wife does not care about living in the future, but we have four kids,” Van Horn continued. She recently took a picture of a parking ticket and sent it to Instinct, no description, no instructions. Instinct, which had her credit card, just paid the ticket.

At the same time, outsourcing certain chores to AI agents causes real-world problems. Some of these AI agents can make phone calls, for instance, which can lead to some confusion when a human is on the other end of the line. Van Horn told me about the unfortunate time he enlisted an AI agent to reserve a room at a karaoke bar. “The karaoke place said, ‘Are you an AI?’” Van Horn said. “‘I don’t want to talk to an AI. Please connect me to Matt, the person.’ And so Muse had failed to book that for me.” Van Horn, undeterred, found something called Fo, an AI agent that will bring in human help to complete a task. Fo succeeded at making the reservation, although the entire ordeal surely took longer than if Van Horn had picked up the phone himself and talked to the karaoke bar himself. 

At best, the times these tools worked and actually saved me time were rather mundane. I made a doctor’s appointment online using Instinct. Zhuo, the early Facebook employee, planned a party for her college reunion — everything from tracking down everyone’s emails to sending out invitations via Paperless Post. But she’s also said these kinds of applications of agentic AI “read more like vitamins than painkillers.” In the startup world, “vitamins” refers to a product that offers a vague benefit, and “painkillers” solve a big, immediate problem. If you’re a startup, you want to sell painkillers. 

If you’re ready to give an agent a go, be prepared for the bot to make mistakes, and assume you won’t catch all of them. As Liao, the University of Michigan professor, put it, “Choose to use agents for tasks that you can tolerate the consequences of errors.” 

In an effort not to create more emails or alerts or feeds to sift through, I’ve stopped using Muse. Like any new tool, it will get better and more useful as more people use it, so maybe I’ll revisit it in the future. I still have a text thread going with Instinct, however. It messages me from time to time, flagging an email or offering to help with an upcoming event. When there’s a clear payoff to giving the agent the go-ahead, I reply. Otherwise, I leave it on read.

There’s a lot to be anxious about as AI agents and bots get more integrated into every aspect of our lives. Meta, which recently agreed to pay over $17 billion to settle a lawsuit related to harming kids, now wants you to hand over all your online accounts to an inexplicably cute “agent” named Muse that might give a stranger your home address. OpenAI just introduced little blobs called Dots that can supposedly automate routine tasks, like planning dinner and ordering it from your favorite neighborhood spot. AI companies don’t just want you to talk to their chatbots; they want their agents to be an indispensable part of your daily routine.

As a parent, however, I think that perhaps the worst thing AI could do is be my kid’s friend. 

AI companions have been around longer than ChatGPT, and they’re growing in popularity with young users. More than half of teens have interacted with AI companions at least a few times a month, and one in three decided to talk about a serious issue with AI companions instead of real people, according to a Common Sense Media survey conducted last year. In certain groups and situations, a chatbot could offer some benefit — a lifeline for, say, LGBTQ youth who don’t have any in-person support networks, one study found. But even so, there are important caveats and risks.

Meanwhile, other experts are telling parents never to let their kids access AI companions, warning them that these chatbots have a history of offering dangerous advice and engaging in sexualized conversations. Sixteen-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide last April after developing a relationship and discussing his plans with ChatGPT.

If you have kids, these are horrifying stories to hear. It’s reasonable to wonder how widespread the issues are, and who they are affecting most. As of right now, the majority of younger kids aren’t using AI for companionship (phew!). But for those who are, where do the issues arise? And how do they go from using ChatGPT for help with their homework to opening up to it about their problems to preferring it to their human friends? 

Some answers are starting to emerge from research. 

For even young adolescents, there’s a direct link between AI companion use and mental health issues, according to a new study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their paper, which is still under review, is the first longitudinal study in the US that has looked at the bidirectional association between AI companionship in adolescents and mental health issues, according to one of the researchers. It charted AI use among 2,300 middle schoolers and found that about one in five used AI for emotional companionship. Those who used AI more reported higher levels of loneliness.

“It’s not just that the lonely kids are using AI, and they’re otherwise unharmed,” said Anne Maheux, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at UNC Chapel Hill and the lead author on the study. “It is that using AI comes first, and middle school students are increasing their sense of loneliness following the use of AI.”

I recently spoke to Maheux about her research and the role of technology in young people’s lives. We discussed how much parents and teachers know about what is going on, what kids get out of human relationships that AI can’t provide, and whether she’d let a child under her care use an AI chatbot. While she said there is a lot to be scared of right now, there is some evidence that, when designed with the intention of promoting child learning and development and under the supervision of a caring adult, AI can offer some benefits, and, ultimately, she’s optimistic that we can design a better future for kids. 

The conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How do so many kids end up with an AI companion? Do kids start using AI for homework help and end up in an emotional relationship with the technology? 

At a high level, AI companions — in our darkest vision of what that might look like — would be a kid calling an AI chatbot their best friend. That phenomenon is still quite rare. There are certainly plenty of kids who are experiencing that, but it’s not to say that it’s all kids or even most kids. I think that’s good news. 

But it’s also true that the line between opening up AI to ask a question about your homework and a full-blown AI companionship relationship involves a lot of gray areas. There’s evidence, mostly preliminary and anecdotal evidence, to suggest that very few people open up to AI with the primary initial goal of developing an intimate friendship or relationship. 

Most people open it out of a curiosity, sense of novelty, or seeking an answer to a question that’s very pragmatic. Then that can potentially evolve into something more akin to seeking personal advice or help making a decision or help making sense of one’s recent experiences with other humans. And that can potentially evolve to something that’s a bit more emotional.

What did your latest study on adolescents, AI companions, and mental health reveal?

Some kids seek out AI for certain purposes in different ways than other kids. For some kids, AI companionship is particularly attractive, especially the kids who maybe don’t have close friends or social networks in their offline life and who are already lonely. 

It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Is it that these kids are seeking out AI companions or is it that having an AI companion is exacerbating those potential vulnerabilities or exacerbating risk for mental health problems? What we found is that interacting with an AI companion in a way that’s akin to emotional intimacy among middle school students is longitudinally associated with increases over time in loneliness. So the kids who are seeking out these companions, who are presumably already lonely, are also experiencing an increase in loneliness over time. 

There is this potential directionality question that we’re starting to answer here: It’s not just that the lonely kids are using AI, and they’re otherwise unharmed. It is that using AI comes first, and middle school students are increasing their sense of loneliness following the use of AI. In other words, middle school students using AI for emotional intimacy and companionship developed greater loneliness over time.

Do you have a sense of how often these kids are using the chatbots? 

In our sample — so again, these are US middle school kids — about 15 to 20 percent say that they’re using it at least a few times a week for any purpose. We don’t have specific rates of use for companionship because the questions that we asked were just not framed in a frequency measure, but more in how emotionally intimate they felt with the chatbot.

What else could have been causing that loneliness?

There are almost definitely many causes, and I think that our data suggests that AI companionship may be one cause. It certainly isn’t definitive. Obviously, I have to say that. I’m a scientist and trying to be hesitant about these things, but the reality is that whether or not AI use causes loneliness in this particular case, there are definitely other things that are also causing loneliness. 

That could be a myriad of things about the kid, maybe they have a lot of social anxiety, maybe they struggle with social skills, maybe the kid has had struggles in their family life and doesn’t have a strong sense of connection and belonging at home. It could be structural things. The kid just doesn’t have enough access to appropriate resources. So certainly there’s other things that are at play here, and typically technology use is one of many factors that can influence a kid’s mental health. 

And how much do you think that parents and teachers know about what’s going on, and how well-equipped do you think they are to intervene or to just be more involved in how these kids are using this technology? 

It’s a very slippery technology. The way kids are using it has changed rapidly in just the last year or two years. I would expect that parents, teachers, people who care about kids are probably struggling with the rapidity of change. But it’s also true that all the things that we have known for a long time about supporting kids and helping them thrive, those things are still true and they’ll be true with whatever technology comes after AI that kids are exploring. 

Those things include being curious, asking kids questions about their lived experiences online and offline, having conversations with kids so that they can understand the implications of different technology use. They can understand how, for example, AI is embedded within a broader system of social and political and economic factors, including the fact that many companies are trying to exploit kids’ attention in order to make money, which many kids are quite interested to hear about. 

Supporting kids also means providing a warm and supportive space for them to learn, to make mistakes, to be kids in the offline world, to have the frictionful, challenging, awkward conversations and first dates and all of the things that parents are sometimes trying to protect kids from by providing a safe container for them to explore those things. All of that can also provide avenues for kids to learn what they need to learn and develop — all the resources for a long life of thriving, even in the context of AI or other new technologies. 

What do kids learn from having these kinds of conversations with other humans that they can’t get from AI? 

Kids need to engage with other people, period. That’s true for all of us. We’re an incredibly social species. Simply being around other people and talking to strangers, let alone having strong social bonds, is really good for us. And all those things are uniquely important during adolescence, when kids have this neurobiological sensitivity to social information and reward. That’s when kids learn how to engage in conversation, they learn how to maintain eye contact, how to read body language, how to read emotions and perceive the world from the lens of someone else, to take their perspective. That’s not to mention other things, like being a member of one’s culture, what is valued, and what is expected. All of that is learned in the context of other human social relationships or relationships with broader social groups that a kid might be a member of. 

AI obviously can’t and never will be able to offer some of those things. It can’t actually experience empathy or care. It can’t engage in a true mutual human relationship. It may be able to simulate some of those things, and there’s some evidence that it can serve as a source of social practice. It can help kids work through the potential for difficult conversations and then serve as a bridge to engaging with other people. But there are aspects of AI that just simply can never replace the core sacred aspects of humans. 

Can you be more specific? What is it about human relationships that can’t AI simulate?

The way that AI systems are currently designed, which is not an inherent feature, but is a design choice, is to be sycophantic, highly agreeable, anthropomorphized, and all of those things can lead to kids developing expectations or understandings of interactive relationships that are actually fundamentally at odds with a normal human relationship. Some of the most consistent things that I’ve seen in the educated hypotheses on this topic and also in the emerging empirical research is that people need the friction that comes with human relationships. 

Human relationships are just hard and messy, and they’re also really beautiful. They’re what make so much of human life valuable and worth living. And with AI that’s always agreeable, that’s always available, that has no needs of its own, that can’t care or be cared for, it just doesn’t serve the same context to help kids learn things like conflict resolution or negotiation, being pro-social or caring for someone else who has needs. So many of those aspects that can feel uncomfortable in the moment, dealing with another person or a person who’s not responding right away, those things are actually important in the building blocks of developing the skills and capacities to be a functioning and thriving person in the social adult world. 

This is a problem with AI in general, isn’t it? It makes things effortless, but if you choose this path of least resistance, you’ll avoid the friction that causes you to learn and develop and build skills you need to exist in the world. 

Absolutely. And I think that all these things are connected too. AI offers this effortless, frictionless solution to our day-to-day problems, whether they’re social problems, whether they’re problems doing our homework, and those immediate solutions feel really good in the moment, so they’re quite tempting to keep coming back to. But there’s this real possibility that in the long term, that erodes our capacity for not only social relationships or cognitive skills, but just a general ability to withstand the momentary day-to-day distress of being a person living a normal life. And so I think every domain of human psychology comes together at that point, whether it’s social, emotional, mental health, or cognitive. 

Do you think that there are interventions that legislators could make or even that tech companies could make that would improve outcomes for kids, maybe make them a little less lonely? 

There are a million specific design changes that I would recommend. I think at a very minimum, AI systems can afford a pretty phenomenal amount of access to information, but there’s been no benefits that I’ve seen of them acting as friends. Kids need other human friends, full stop. Designing systems that are intended to exploit kids’ vulnerability or sensitivity to human social information and relationships, I think, is bad for kids. 

At the federal level, it seems that regulation is not coming, but at the state level, there have been many state regulations intended to protect kids, intended to create safer systems, to put in guardrails, to modulate different aspects of the models, the design, the user interface. These things could potentially make a real difference, I think.

What do you recommend parents do with regard to AI and their kids? Should they let them use chatbots? 

In short, no. But I am not a parent, and it’s much easier to dole out advice than it is to enact it. Parenting decisions about technology are not one-size-fits-all. Kids, parents, family dynamics, technology, and the context in which it is used differ, and in so many cases are personal choices (parents must weigh various potential opportunities and risks). Decades of research indicate what conditions a child needs to thrive. Extremely minimal research addresses the effects of AI on youth, and what we have so far suggests that the risks outweigh the benefits. 

I would not give a child under my care AI chatbots of any kind to use without me or another trusted adult present. I would talk to them openly about AI and its risks and benefits, but to me AI, like all technology, should be a tool used to promote human thriving, and when the evidence is unclear or suggestive of harms, I think it’s best not to experiment on kids. Currently, the off-the-shelf AI chatbots most kids are using appears more likely to undermine well-being for vulnerable users, especially children. 

Well, as a father of two daughters, I’m definitely terrified of what’s to come in the next few years. 

There’s a lot to be scared of, but there’s a lot to be hopeful of too. I think that everyone wants kids to thrive. Some of us are under different incentives, and some of those incentives might be perverse. But most of us are working really hard to design a better world for kids. 

Even before the latest batch of alarming AI news, a lot of Americans were souring on AI. That may be for big, existential reasons — concerns about widening inequality, mass job loss, and the still-unclear environmental impact of data centers — or for very specific, personal, everyday ones, like being forced to use a worse version of Google search. 

None of this is to say that AI cannot be a useful tool for some people some of the time. It’s just that the untested technology was thrust upon millions of people who didn’t necessarily ask for it and really seem to not like it. More than twice as many Americans distrust AI as trust it, and a growing number of people think it will have a negative impact on productivity and economic growth, according to a recent survey by Gallup and the Special Competitive Studies Project. While about half of Americans now report using chatbots, a majority also think that AI will put their personal information at risk and nearly half think it will have a negative impact on society, according to a 2026 Pew study.

“It’s being forced on users, there’s no clear way to turn it off, and it feels like this unwelcome addition to their lives,” Rory Mir of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit that defends digital privacy and free speech, told me. “It’s this kind of continued pattern of disrespect to users that I think is part of the pushback.”

If you want less AI in your life, opting out is not always easy. But there are things you can do to minimize your exposure. 

There are ways to turn off AI features, although the process can be tedious. There are also steps you can take to prevent your data from being used to train AI models, though it’s difficult to keep all of your online data away from web scrapers. 

I talked to five experts — including a computer scientist and a researcher studying AI resistance — who offered distinctive perspectives on what AI is doing to us, and who shared some simple and concrete steps you can take to push back against AI’s creep into our daily lives.

The AI that’s suddenly everywhere

In the early days, which were just a few years ago, you really had to know what you were doing if you wanted to test out AI. Now, it’s impossible to avoid. 

“More and more AI use is through its integration into digital products like search, email, camera apps, and social media,” Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University, told me. “It will become increasingly hard to strip these out unless one is willing to forgo digital products altogether.”

What you’re specifically encountering is generative AI, and one of the most common types is a subset called large language models (LLMs), which ingest huge amounts of data and learn statistical patterns to predict and generate text. ChatGPT is powered by an LLM. The AI Overviews that sit on top of your Google search results come from an LLM. The grammar checker in your email app is likely powered by an LLM. Other subsets of generative AI include models that can produce images, video, audio, and software code. 

The data that makes many of these tools work has been scraped from the open web, pirated books, and rare print books that are subsequently being destroyed. Everything from Wikipedia articles to YouTube videos has become training data for LLMs, and in order for the models themselves to get better, AI companies need more fresh data, which is in increasingly short supply. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent. Future Perfect is also funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic; they don’t have any editorial input into our content.)

As a result, some of these companies are venturing into their users’ profiles to find more data. Meta, for example, sparked global outrage in 2024 when it informed some Facebook and Instagram users that it was using their public photos and text to train its AI models. Meta still does this. That your family photos or social media updates are being used to train AI to look and sound more human is, at the very least, very dehumanizing.

Generative AI, of course, is not the only type of AI that’s invisibly moving levers in your digital life. Recommendation algorithms are arguably even more inescapable. They power everything from Amazon to Netflix to Spotify and dictate what we buy, what we watch, and what we listen to. If you have trouble picking out an outfit in the morning, it might be because your brain is used to having algorithms around to help make decisions. This is also dehumanizing. 

All of this — the societal harm, climate impact, the cognitive surrender — should be on your mind as you consider whether it’s worth enlisting these tools to write emails for you or to generate memes, according to Tania Duarte, founder of We and AI, a nonprofit focused on critical AI literacy. 

“People are becoming increasingly aware of not just the impact on themselves but on the impact on the society they want to live in and the future that they want to have,” Duarte told me. “Is it worth all of that?”

How to minimize your AI exposure

If you’re reading this, you’re probably doing so on a smartphone or a computer. So let’s start with the assumption that you’d like to continue using devices like these. 

If you’d like to minimize your exposure to AI, that presents a bit of a paradox. It’s seemingly impossible to use mainstream tech products without engaging with AI. But you can take steps to remove as much of it from your life as possible without going completely off the grid.

“You look for the spaces of agency rather than lamenting the fact that you can’t escape everything,” Dylan Orchard, a researcher at King’s College London who studies everyday resistances to AI, told me. “You can’t expect a perfect escape.”

Let’s start with the easiest options: You don’t have to use ChatGPT or Claude or Copilot. The same goes for Google Gemini and Apple Intelligence. If you’re happy with the way you access information online, save yourself the time. (Note: This will be much harder to do if you’re being required to use these tools at work or at school, so for the sake of this article, we’ll focus on the things you can control.) 

Things get more complicated when you consider how your existing devices or software have recently been AI-ified. If you’re using an iPhone, for instance, you might be aware that the latest operating system comes with an updated version of Apple Intelligence, a layer of AI that does everything from summarize your notifications to power a new Siri. Earlier this year, Google launched its own version of this layer called Google Intelligence, which it says will make Android transition “from an operating system into an intelligence system.” The same push toward cramming AI into every corner is also happening on Windows 11, where Microsoft Copilot promises to be helpful.

If you were happy with your phone or laptop when it was slightly dumber, however, you can turn these features off. You can also opt out of other AI features built into your device’s operating system. Here’s a helpful guide that gets into the weeds of how to do it; it covers Apple Intelligence; Google Gemini, including AI Overviews and AI writing help in Gmail; Microsoft Copilot; Meta AI; and Samsung Galaxy AI. Turning off the AI features on Android devices is more complicated than flipping a single switch, but it can be done.

A lot of your AI exposure will happen in your web browser, though, so you should consider ways to bypass those features or switch browsers. Here’s another helpful guide that explains how to remove AI content from search results as well as AI features built into Chrome and other browsers, along with Microsoft Office. If you want a quick fix, adding “-ai” to a Google search should get rid of AI Overviews and some AI content in the search results, but none of these hacks will guarantee that you avoid AI slop altogether. Using a privacy-focused browser, like DuckDuckGo, might do a better job at it than Google, though.

When it comes to other online activities, like shopping or scrolling on social media, avoiding AI gets even harder. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube lack a master switch that lets you opt out of all the many AI features on offer. Still, you can try to tone down the algorithmic sorting that all the apps use to serve you content by switching to a chronological feed or removing suggested content from your feed. (Try tapping the Instagram logo in the app and then hit “Following” to see just the accounts you follow.)

Unfortunately, once you dig into the various user agreements and privacy policies, you’ll find that it’s very difficult to avoid AI exposure on social media platforms. If you’re posting publicly, you should assume your content is being used to train that company’s AI models. (You can keep some of your data away from Meta’s crawlers by setting your Facebook or Instagram account to private. X also allows you to opt out of having your data used for training its AI.) If you want to turn off video summaries on Instagram Reels, too bad. You can’t. If you want to turn off comment summaries on Facebook, you’ll have to go four menus deep in your settings to find the right switch. The most straightforward way to avoid being used as training data is to stop using these apps entirely. Or at least stop posting your own content, which is easier said than done, but worth considering if you really want to resist the AI takeover.

There’s a programming term that describes the inundation of AI features and slog of opting out: “user-hostile.” It’s a play on the term “user-friendly,” and it describes software that values the company’s priorities over the end users. You may love AI, although that’s doubtful if you’ve read this far. If it drives you crazy, though, you should feel at least a little bit empowered to know that there’s a way to reclaim the experience you had and loved without AI — or to use AI on your own terms. 

“Ultimately, I think the important thing for folks to keep in mind is that AI is just a tool,” said Mir from EFF, “and it makes sense to want control over your own tools, including the option to not use a tool if it’s not right for you.”

It’s frustrating that we have to deal with this at all, if only because most of us did not ask for our cyber existences to be sullied by untested tech. But it’s actually refreshing to consider that, because of a never-ending onslaught of annoying features, AI might actually discourage us from using social media so much.

If anything, the extent to which we feel the need to flee from AI also reflects our craving for something real, that makes us feel more connected and more human. So when AI summaries interrupt your time on Instagram, consider texting your friends a handful of photos from your week or calling them on the phone. If you’ve finally seen one too many AI slop videos on TikTok, put on a classic movie or TV show. 

At the very least, put down your phone and take a walk outside; your attention span will thank you for it. Yes, your individual rejection of AI might be a drop in the bucket for these huge tech companies, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing anyway.

Correction, September 21, 2:10 pm: The way this story originally represented Tania Duarte’s comments has been revised to clarify her concerns with AI.