A researcher at , a nonprofit focused on human connection in the age of AI, Lee asked: Why not?

In a word, the girl said: Instagram.

“If you try to dance at prom, you’re going to look stupid at some point,” Lee recalled her saying. Eventually someone will pull out a phone and you’ll end up on someone’s feed, seen by “the entire school” with mortifying results. Better just to play it safe. 

“Everybody just goes to prom to look cute,” the girl explained, “take a picture for the ‘gram, eat and leave.”

For Lee, who has spent years studying human belonging, that exchange unlocked an important, if unspoken, part of why AI holds such appeal. “We’ve created this set of conditions where young people don’t feel like they have permission to be their real, unfiltered selves,” she said in an interview. So they turn to AI, which is programmed to affirm them at every step.

from Lee and her colleagues offer this insight among others, painting a detailed portrait of how young people use AI and why. They surveyed 2,383 people ages 13 to 24 across the U.S. and found that for nearly half of them, AI has already reshaped their relationships in ways that are largely flying under the radar of parents, teachers and policymakers.

Among the findings:

• Just 15% of young people are in relationships with “personified AI” characters — but for about 45%, AI is already reshaping their real-life relationships;
• 53% of young people say they set clear boundaries with AI, using it alongside — not instead of — human support;
• 61% say parents rarely or never talk to them about AI, and 53% say the same about teachers;
• Youth from low-income households are three times less likely as others to engage with AI, but they report greater feeling: 21% feel lonely often or all the time, compared to 6% of high-income youth; 57% feel like a burden to others, compared to 42%; and only 34% feel a strong sense of belonging at school, compared to 62%.

For the study, researchers sorted respondents into four broad clusters. About 28% rarely or never use AI, often out of ethical reasons or just disinterest. The largest group, 39%, uses AI primarily as a practical tool. They turn to chatbots such as Claude, ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini for homework and research, while keeping clear boundaries between AI and their emotional lives. 

Another 18% use AI for personal and relational support, such as venting about a tough day, seeking relationship advice and processing emotions. And 15% engage with AI characters and personas in more intimate, companion-like ways.

Within the four groups, researchers found nine variations that challenge the conventional wisdom around AI use. For instance, among those who use AI for emotional support were two very different groups. Rithm calls them “Social Processors” and “Private Processors.” While they may look similar from the outside — both say they have lots of friends and use AI to work through their emotions — surveys found that the Social Processors use AI as just one tool among many. The Private Processors, by contrast, use it as a substitute for real human interactions because they feel they can’t bring problems to those around them.

That data point could hold the key to understanding problematic AI use, Lee and her colleagues said, challenging the idea that lonely teens with small social circles are most at risk of unhealthy AI dependence. The data suggest something else altogether, said Kashyap Rajesh, a rising junior at Cornell University who consulted on the report.

“The driver of risky AI use is not necessarily isolation,” he said. “It’s feeling like a burden [to others] — and that came through in the research.” 

The number of friends a young person has, the size of their social circle, how busy they are, whether they’ve got family nearby and even their feelings of loneliness barely predict whether they’ll fall into dependent AI use, he said. “What actually predicts it is specific feelings: Feeling like a burden to others, feeling like you can’t be your real self, feeling like there’s no one to turn to.”

Julia Freeland Fisher, a researcher at the Clayton Christensen Institute who advised on the study, said that finding should help start a different kind of conversation around AI. “Burdening one another is building reciprocity, which is how we maintain the social contract, how we maintain social cohesion,” she said. That young people are increasingly bypassing this step should be alarming, she said.

“AI companions wouldn’t be nearly so disruptive to human connection if we had a sturdier social fabric,” said Fisher. “It’s the weakness of our social fabric that makes these [findings] so worrisome, not necessarily the technology itself.”

‘It just keeps feeling easier than the alternative’

For Lee, the finding on being a burden reframes so much of our understanding about young people’s relationship to AI. Virtually every survey respondent reported a specific “relational rupture” or crisis that made them turn to the technology. 

One young woman’s first question to a chatbot was, “I didn’t get asked to Homecoming — am I unlovable?” Another: “I got into a huge fight with my best friend, and I don’t want to tell anybody else because I don’t want them to take sides, so I needed to ask AI.”

“Story after story after story,” Lee recalled, “of a very singular, acute, discrete moment when they really had a moment of need and needed somewhere to put it.”

Rajesh, the Cornell student, said the data reveal a steady shift in which perhaps millions of young people are quietly moving from letting AI help with homework to asking it to mediate their emotional lives.

“They start off using it to help them write an essay, or help them prepare for their interview, or to study for an exam,” he said. “And they’re like, ‘OK, damn, this is really good, this is really helpful.’ And eventually their interactions escalate.”

The drift happens gradually, he said. AI helps draft an email or respond to a text. Next it’s helping to navigate a social situation. Before long it’s processing a breakup.

Rajesh, who’s studying information science and AI policy, said his own AI use crept up on him: He went from studying with Claude to creating personalized AI study guides to wondering if even attending class mattered. 

“I found that how many times I go to class and how actively I’m paying attention in class is actually not the biggest indicator of my understanding of the content or exam performance,” he said. “It’s actually just how much time I spend with Claude dissecting the lecture slides and building study guides that work for me.”

The report notes that because even productivity-focused platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are engineered to interact with warmth and reassurance, what starts out as homework help or playful experimentation can evolve into a substitute for human interaction.

What adults get wrong

Alongside the findings on AI use, researchers found that how adults talk about AI is also potentially problematic: Their conversations are almost always about academic integrity — cheating, plagiarism, source citation — and rarely about relationships.

Rajesh said adults should be asking directly whether young people are using AI to process emotions, to rehearse hard conversations and to get support when they’re struggling. “Those are questions that signal to a young person that the adult knows this dimension exists and isn’t going to freak out about it — which is, I think, the prerequisite for any honest conversation happening at all.”

Michelle Culver, the Rithm Project’s founder and a co-author of the report, said young people tell researchers that when the topic is AI use, they’re “navigating it alone.” She suggested that adults approach the topic with “curiosity” rather than “judgment or shaming.” That could help both sides gain insight into each others’ struggles in the face of a technology that’s constantly challenging their reality.

In the same way that educators are worried that young people aren’t engaging in the “productive struggle” of learning academic content, Culver said, “We similarly worry that young people might offload the relational work to AI and become ill-equipped to handle the very messy human friction of real relationships.”

“While Google’s been offering educational products for 20 years, this is a different moment for us,” said Chris Phillips, Google’s vice president and general manager of education.

He called the effort the largest for Google in two decades of working with teachers and students. Phillips didn’t immediately offer a price tag, but said it’s “a sizable investment.”

The training, offered through the ed tech-focused group , will include hands-on experience with Google’s Gemini and NotebookLM tools, offering certificates and digital badges.

“We have just heard so much feedback from teachers that are just saying, ‘We are not prepared,’” said Richard Culatta, ISTE+ASCD’s CEO. “‘We don’t have the training, we don’t have the background that we need for the realities of teaching in an AI world, both teaching in the classroom and also, secondarily, but equally as important, preparing students for the world that they’re going to be in.’”

It’s the latest in a series of large-scale teacher training initiatives over the past few months. In July, the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, announced its own $23 million , partnering with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic to train up to 400,000 educators.

At the time, AFT President Randi Weingarten said the academy was a way to ensure that teachers, not technology, remain in control of the classroom.

But AFT’s partnership with OpenAI and Anthropic drew sharp criticism from educators and researchers, who questioned whether tech companies with products to sell and market share to protect are the right architects for teacher training. Education technology critic Audrey Watters called AFT’s academy “a gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for,” while ed tech analyst Alex Sarlin said tech companies were in a “land-grab moment.” 

Microsoft has also launched its own community-based platform, Microsoft Elevate for Educators, offering free courses, live training sessions and credentials. 

Google itself in 2024 committed $25 million through its philanthropic arm to several nonprofits, including ISTE+ASCD, 4-H, and aiEDU, with particular attention to reaching underserved communities. Its goal at the time was to reach more than half a million K-12 and college students, as well as educators.

ISTE+ASCD — the group is a combination of two that merged in 2023 — was the beneficiary of $10 million of the $25 million, saying it would collaborate with several other groups, including the National Education Association and the Computer Science Teachers Association.

Though Google has its own AI platform, Culatta insisted that the work won’t be about pushing specific tools, saying that kids need enduring AI skills as the tools change. 

In 2023 ISTE+ASCD introduced its own AI chatbot built on educator-focused content and trained solely on materials developed or approved by the organization. The chabot tapped into curated databases in a bid to give teachers routine access to high-quality research. 

In some ways, efforts like those of AFT and others reflect a lack of leadership at the federal level. The Trump administration, through an , has backed efforts to expand AI in schools, but has also eliminated the Office of Educational Technology, which long focused on making access to technology until Trump last spring.

Culatta, who ran the office under President Obama, said it’s important that organizations like ISTE+ASCD “step up when there are key needs that may not be filled at the federal level. And we just want to make sure that, regardless of where we would like some things to happen, at this point we just have to do all-hands-on-deck and make sure we’re supporting kids and teachers.”

‘Massive undertaking’ or waste of time?

The sheer scale of Monday’s announcement underscores how urgently educators see the need to learn about AI: RAND Corp. last spring found that the number of school districts training teachers on AI from 2023 to 2024, from 23% to 48%. Researchers predicted that as many as three-fourths of districts would be in the AI training business by the end of 2025. 

Robin Lake, director of the at Arizona State University, said the new partnership is “a massive undertaking that is urgently needed right now. I hope it includes a research component so we can learn from it because much more is needed.”

Google’s Phillips said the company has “multiple arms of research happening all around the world” and “will start to produce some of those and share them publicly where we’re doing studies” in classrooms.

“We’ll see how the results land, but ultimately we want to improve learning outcomes,” he said. “We want to help change. We want to bend the curves on proficiency.”

Lake, who has long urged schools to take AI readiness seriously, said school principals, district leaders and teachers-in-training “also need to be AI literate, as do students and families. We can’t rely only on private companies with an interest in AI products to fund and lead AI readiness.”

Others were more sharply critical of the new partnership.

Justin Reich, an associate professor of digital media at MIT and host of the podcast , said industry-sponsored professional development is, at its core, a “customer acquisition” campaign. Since ISTE+ASCD is historically both a membership-driven teacher organization and an industry trade association, he asked, “How can it be an honest broker to those two constituencies, while also launching an enormous initiative that privileges the products of one particular vendor?”

Google’s past educator certification programs, he said, “focused more on tool use and adoption than on learning,” with no substantive evidence that improved student outcomes followed.

Phillips said its research is ongoing, but noted that its app is allowing students to self-pace lessons. “Where they struggle, they can dive deeper and learn more and get more up-to-date,” he said. Among several unpublished findings, Phillips said, is one that found students spend more time on topics they’re struggling with and end up learning these topics more deeply. 

Culatta admitted that Google would of course like to see its products in the hands of teachers. But he said he and his colleagues “want to make sure that if there are products going to schools — and they already are — that they’re being used in ways that are really impactful.”

He added, “If it was going to just be, ‘Here’s how to use Gemini,’ Google actually doesn’t need us. We are coming in because Google is looking for somebody who can say, ‘What are really the best practices for learning with AI, not necessarily learning about AI?’”

Google’s Phillips said teachers and students “can choose other products in the market and so forth, but this program does come with using our products so that we can help teachers really get started, get going.” 

He noted a “super-generous free tier” to make the tools widely accessible, and the training to use it. “But schools, districts, teachers themselves have choice, and I think that’s perfectly fine, but we want to play a role with not just providing tools, giving people access, but actually helping them apply it and use it” to jumpstart “safe, appropriate use of AI.”

MIT’s Reich said his deeper concern is what he said is the near-total absence of evidence underlying AI professional development, either to teach educators how to use AI in their classrooms or simply to teach them how AI and large language models work.

“Literally no one on the planet understands how [AI] works,” he said. “The best computer scientists in the world cannot explain why LLMs generate plausible sounding text in a convincing theoretical framework.”

Reich recounted asking engineers at a Google DeepMind event in November whether they knew how to train junior engineers to use AI tools effectively in their work. “Every single person I talked to said, ‘No,’” he said. “If Google doesn’t know how to effectively use AI to write code, what is this business about teaching people AI literacy? We just don’t know.”

Benjamin Riley, a well-known AI skeptic who founded the think tank , was more blunt, casting the Google partnership as part of an ongoing process making ISTE+ASCD a “shill” for Big Tech.

“I admit I’m fascinated to see the major Big Tech companies competing so vigorously to control ‘the education market,’” Riley said. “OpenAI is giving away their premium model to teachers (until they won’t), and now Google is doing whatever this is.”

In the past, Riley has questioned whether offering teachers and students skills such as “AI literacy” and “AI readiness” are effective, even as many others warn that they’ll be essential.

“I guess I’d credit their clairvoyance a tad more if ISTE+ASCD had not claimed, as recently as just a few years ago, that ‘the future’ would also demand that everyone . Oops!”

Riley, who also founded the cognitive science advocacy and research group , predicted that much of the training will end up wasting teachers’ time, Google’s money and ISTE+ASCD’s relevance. 

“Human beings have evolved to learn from each other in the context of our relationships. This is the superpower of our species, and the kids who’ve grown up in the past 20 years are increasingly disgusted by what tech has done to them personally, and society more broadly. They are not happy about the world we’ve given them, and their voices are growing ever louder.”

Culatta, for his part, said AI “is not going away. Does learning happen with people connected with each other? Sure. It’s not the only way learning happens, but it’s a very important way. And we actually think AI can help make those human-to-human learning experiences much better.”