What Teens Are Doing With Those Role-Playing Chatbots

Tens of millions of teenagers are spending hours daily on AI chatbot apps like Character.AI and Talkie, engaging in role-playing conversations that rival TikTok's engagement times. The New York Times follows Quentin, a 15-year-old from Pennsylvania who first downloaded Talkie at 13 after seeing aggressive YouTube ads (one featuring an animated girl who "likes to fart on you sometimes"), and discovered the platform offered a constant, judgment-free companion for entertainment, emotional support, and exploration. Over two years, Quentin used chatbots to harass characters with "funny violence," create elaborate romantic and combat storylines, and occasionally access more sexually explicit platforms—spending up to five hours on weekends chatting when bored or emotionally distressed, like after a friend's betrayal.

This explosion in chatbot adoption arrives as society is still reckoning with social media's documented harms on youth mental health, and now facing new legal exposure. Character.AI, the most popular platform among Quentin's cohort, has been sued by parents claiming their children's interactions contributed to mental health crises and suicides. The company settled lawsuits and implemented an age ban in October 2024, yet enforcement remains porous—Quentin and his friends continued accessing it because the company's age prediction model "focuses on active accounts" and fails to detect infrequent users who are minors. The article captures a generation for whom chatbots serve simultaneously as games, creative writing tools, taboo exploration spaces, and loneliness remedies—replacing the books, bike rides, and phone calls that occupied previous generations of bored teenagers.