“Did you see that someone married their ChatGPT companion?” my youngest asked. His next question came right on the heels of the first: “Do we have any cereal?”

The breathtaking juxtaposition of these questions sums up what it feels like to parent in the age of AI. Jarring, sensational news followed by the completely mundane. Just in the last few months one AI researcher put the odds that AI will destroy humanity at more than ten percent. A woman in Japan held a wedding ceremony with her AI companion. An AI system cracked a math problem that the world’s leading mathematicians had never been able to solve. 

Yet still, we want cereal. Because we are, after all, human.

The Gap

The gap between the extraordinary and the ordinary makes it easy to either catastrophize or insist that nothing has changed. But that gap is also where most of our actual experiences with AI live. Young people are not a monolith when it comes to AI. Their experiences range from avoiding it altogether to relying on it regularly for emotional support. 

Yet teens and adults alike are experiencing the subtle creep of AI into our daily lives. AI overviews in search results, message suggestions in emails, and warm affirmations from chatbots remind us that AI is always there, ready to assist. These more subtle shifts in our interactions are harder to name and more difficult to track. They rarely hit the headlines but have the power to reshape our relationship with ourselves, each other, and our learning.

I am so grateful that The Rithm Project has been tracking these patterns in real time. After two years of researching young people’s interactions with AI, they note that young people are often “surprised by the role AI has come to play in their relational worlds.”  The Rithm Project uses the metaphor of currents to describe this dynamic. It’s as if young people entered the water, bobbed around and enjoyed the waves, and then realized that they had drifted quite a ways from their original spot on the beach. 

Most of us can relate to this metaphor. We might have strong opinions about big AI headlines, but when it comes to our daily interactions we are far less aware of how far we are from where we started.

The Currents

The Rithm Project team has identified four “invisible pulls,” or currents, that represent fundamental shifts in how we relate to ourselves and to others in the age of AI. 

Current 1: “AI is blurring our sense of what is authentic and trustworthy.”

When AI first arrived on the scene, my kids loved pointing out the obvious flaws in AI generated images. The extra finger or bizarre smile gave it away. Those tells have disappeared, and it is increasingly difficult to reliably tell the difference. Young people are left wondering what is real and trustworthy versus what is fake and dangerous. They are concerned that their own likeness will be used in AI generated content and are grappling with other questions of authenticity. “Did my friend really write this? Do they mean it? What do they really think?” This current may pull us toward mistrust or a persistent desire to share only “shined up” versions of our words or images. It may also push us toward low or no tech experiences and interactions, in all their messy and imperfect glory.

Current 2: “We are moving from building relationships through technology to building relationships with technology itself.”

Long before generative AI, we got a Roomba vacuum cleaner in hopes of clearing the house of the husky fur that seemed to be everywhere and on everything. Within days of watching that little machine do its best against the dog hair, I noticed the pull to name it and thank it for its heroic efforts. I felt a little sad for the robot when it became clear that the husky vs. Roomba match up was an unfair fight, and we sold it. 

I am not alone in feeling attached to a machine. And while it isn’t entirely new, AI is amplifying this dynamic in ways that mark a distinct shift from our socially networked online lives. Rather than connecting with friends on platforms, or even with influencers or celebrities, we are forming bonds with the tech itself. Researchers like Sherry Turkle have been looking at our capacity to form bonds with robots for decades. She began studying human-tech interactions when early prototypes started “pulling for an affective response. They aren’t just saying ‘I’m smart,’ they are saying ‘I care.” 

My Roomba never engaged me in back-and-forth conversation, but today’s chatbots do. To be clear, many young people are using AI as a thought partner for social problem solving rather than a substitution for human relationships. Many are skeptical of AI and aware that these tools are designed to offer endless affirmations. The Rithm Project has even created a blueprint for prosocial AI. And yet, the line is blurry in existing systems, and the pull of nonjudgmental and frictionless support can make for a quick slide into emotional intimacy. This pull might feel especially strong for young people who don’t experience belonging and rich connections offline.

Current 3: “AI is shaping our inner voice, changing how we understand and relate to ourselves.”

During adolescence, answering the questions, “Who am I?” and, “Who do I want to be?” are core developmental tasks. Teens have long turned to online connections and communities for this work. They have also organized their thinking and opinions through commenting, creating, and sharing online. The shift here is not that identity work and honing our “inner voice” is taking place online. It’s that the tools now talk back and, for some young people, become the first place they go to make sense of their thoughts and experiences. 

AI models retain every detail and can surface meaningful and helpful patterns that we might not recognize ourselves. It might help us hone our thinking and prompt reflection. On the other hand, social misunderstandings and conflict are not just where adolescents learn how to work things out with other people. It is also where they start to better understand themselves. Always available and affirming feedback from bots may pull us further from that process of self understanding and discovery.

Current 4: “AI is acting on our behalf, absorbing work that relationships are built on.”

My teenager has an app on his phone that reminds him of people’s birthdays. As someone who struggles to track dates like this, I can see the value here. He is the first to send a text on someone’s special day. But what if the app promised to not just track the day, but send the message too? This shift is worth watching. 

Whether it is work, school, or relational tasks, AI offers all kinds of ways to “get our time back.” But we shouldn’t skip over the question, “for what?” AI provides endless solutions for doing work on our behalf. This may free up time for face-to-face interaction, something that young people say they want and need. On the other hand, it could be that the task of composing a short birthday text is part of the work of building and maintaining relationships, the kind of work that makes our moments together more meaningful. 

Noticing the Water, Naming the Currents

These currents won’t pull equally at all developmental stages and they aren’t “natural” or “inevitable” features of AI. They are shaped by design choices, economic models, and the ways AI is woven into our daily lives, whether we opt in or not. Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute has already rated several popular products, including ChatGPT for Teens, an “Unacceptable Risk” to young users. 

But, like so many parts of parenting, it helps to be both cautious and curious. We can set strong boundaries while also acknowledging the mixed experiences and tricky trade-offs young people are navigating when it comes to AI. Young people are already using AI tools regularly and many are not talking to adults about it. When adults broach the subject, the focus is typically academics and cheating. Yet this project makes clear that the currents of AI are pulling us toward places far more complicated than getting the right or wrong answer on a test. 

So this is a good time to turn away from dramatic headlines and take a deep breath. Pour ourselves a bowl of cereal. Activate the incredible superpowers of human curiosity and introspection. And explore The Four Currents on The Rithm Project website. The site has interactive features and powerful examples of how each current pulls on our daily interactions.

The Four Currents project isn’t designed to tell us what to think about these shifts, but to help us notice them. Because we won’t know when to start swimming, or which stretch of the shoreline to head toward, if we don’t notice that we are already on the move.  

Here are three questions The Rithm Project suggests we ask ourselves:

• Where have you already seen or experienced this?
• What are the possible upsides for human connection? 
• What are the biggest risks and who will they hit the hardest?

It’s hard to talk with young people about things we haven’t spent time reflecting ourselves. Exploring these questions is likely to evoke strong and mixed feelings. This is good. It’s an invitation to try to make sense of them together. It’s also a reminder that we are, after all, human.