Restoration, Exploration and Transformation: How Youth Engage Character.AI Chatbots for Feels, Fun and Finding themselves

TL;DR

This study explores how adolescents and non-binary youth engage with Character.AI chatbots for emotional, creative, and identity-related purposes, revealing their innovative uses and unmet needs.

Contribution

It provides a descriptive account of youth interactions with AI, introduces a framework of engagement intents, and develops a taxonomy of character archetypes.

Findings

50% of highly engaged users are adolescents aged 13-17

Most users (59%) create their own characters

Identifies three engagement intents: Restoration, Exploration, Transformation

Abstract

Young people are among the fastest adopters of generative AI, yet research emphasises adult-designed tools and experiments rather than playful, self-directed youth use. We analysed discourse from 4,172 users in Character.AI's official Discord, finding that the most engaged users were predominantly adolescents (50% aged 13-17), female or non-binary (61.9%), with most (59%) creating their own characters. We contribute (1) a descriptive account of how highly-engaged youth on Character.AI's Discord use AI for playful, emotional, and creative practices that push the platform limits; (2) a framework of three engagement intents -- Restoration (emotional regulation), Exploration (creative experimentation), and Transformation (identity development); and (3) a taxonomy of seven youth-created character archetypes. Together, these findings reveal how youth invent novel roles for AI, expose critical misalignments between youth use and current AI experiences, and provide frameworks for researchers and practitioners to design youth-centred AI futures.