AI companions are becoming popular with American teens

A growing number of US kids are having very real conversations with their imaginary friends.

AI companions, defined as "digital friends or characters you can text or talk with whenever you want,” have reached near-ubiquitous levels of usage among Americans aged 13-17, according to a survey published yesterday by Common Sense Media.

By the numbers

The vast majority of US teens (72%) say they’ve had at least one interaction with an AI companion, Common Sense found. Over half of teens (52%) qualify as regular users who interact with AI companions at least a few times per month, per the survey, with daily users making up 13% of the teen population.

• On the whole, however, teens don’t really trust the bots—and still prefer the company of people.
• 80% of AI companion users say they spend more time with real friends than companion bots, while 67% find AI conversations less satisfying than human conversations.

That’s probably a good thing: AI companions—which have been linked to potentially dangerous interactions with minors, including recent lawsuits claiming the bots bear some responsibility for two separate incidents where teens took their own lives—are unusually effective at grabbing and holding users' attention, even compared to other AI-based apps. The average number of user sessions for companion AIs is over 10x that of models for general assistants, content generation, and messaging, according to data from Andreessen Horowitz.

To help in the gold rush for user attention…Elon Musk's xAI launched AI companions for its flagship Grok model earlier this week, while AI companion app Tolan recently closed $20 million in new funding. And don’t forget about what Sam Altman and Jony Ive are cooking up.