For two and a half years now, staff at the Christmas Seal Homes have been noticing a shift in the digital habits of some of the vulnerable children they work with. The children, ages 7 to 14 and typically struggling with poor well-being or loneliness, had begun having regular conversations with AI chatbots such as Character.ai or Snapchat’s ’MyAI’.

Since then, the trend has spread. Even among children as young as 7 or 8, who don’t yet have a well-developed written language, but instead use their voices to carry on conversations with the artificially intelligent chat tools.