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“Two to Four Kids in Every Classroom” Would Rather Talk to a Chatbot. 4 Things Researchers Said This Week, and the One They Can’t Say Yet.
A new coalition of psychologists met in North Carolina to try to study AI and kids faster than anyone studied social media. Their most striking number is about loneliness, not technology.
On Tuesday, Mitch Prinstein, a psychologist at UNC Chapel Hill, told NPR’s Rhitu Chatterjee something that’s hard to file anywhere comfortable: “about two to four kids in every classroom are already saying they would prefer interacting with an AI chatbot more than an actual human peer.”
He said it at the first conference of a new group, the AI Psychological Research Coalition, held October 18 to 20 at UNC. Here’s what came out of it, roughly in order of how much it stuck with me.
1. The preference number is a friendship number
Start with where that line comes from. Prinstein’s team surveyed more than 2,000 middle schoolers in one state, in a study NPR describes as soon to be published. Over half were already using chatbots. And, in his words, kids “tell us…
