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What US teens are doing with those role-playing chatbots
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A growing number of companies offering social chatbots that can act like friends, enemies, lovers, adventurous companions, or the manifestation of a fictional or real person.
PHOTO: SHIN MIN DAILY NEWS
Kashmir Hill
When Quentin was 13, he kept seeing ads on YouTube for Talkie, an app with “countless AIs eager to speak with you”. The ads were weird, he said, and sometimes crude. One ad featured an animated girl named Valerie who “likes to fart on you sometimes”.
That was in 2023, the year of the social chatbot invasion, when a slew of smartphone apps offering “AI chat” were released, most rated 13+. Their online ads were ubiquitous and unsettling enough that young people complained about them, with one teen streamer accusing Talkie, for example, of “promoting sexual chats with AIs to a bunch of children who watch YouTube”.
