AI, intelligence, and children

Abstract

The nature of intelligence is a major scientific question. Daniel Kahneman made major contributions to the study of human intelligence. A related question is whether machines can be considered to be intelligent. This question goes back to the 19^th Century. “Precisely how much the business of thinking a machine could possibly be made to perform, and what part of it must be left to the living mind is a question not without conceivable practical importance,” wrote the American philosopher Charles S. Pierce in 1887. In his Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), Alan M. Turing proposed the “Imitation Game”, now known as the “Turing Test”. In that test, a human evaluator attempts to distinguish between a human and a machine by means of a (technology-mediated) conversation. An intelligent machine should be able to converse indistinguishably from a human.

The Turing Test has been a subject of intense philosophical debate since its publication. Its most famous criticism has been by the philosopher John Searle in his Chinese Room thought experiment. But this essay focuses on an aspect of the Turing Test that has generally escaped attention. In 1948, two years before his “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Turing wrote a technical report for the National Physical Laboratory in Manchester. The report, titled “Intelligent Machinery,” was effectively the first manifesto of Artificial Intelligence. In that report Turing already proposed the Imitation Game, but the proposed interaction between the evaluator and the human/machine was via a chess game, rather than a conversation. In 1950, Turing changed the test from chess playing to conversing.

But the key difference between the 1948 paper and the 1950 paper was not in the details of the test. Rather, in the 1948 Turing did not attempt to define intelligence. Instead, he referred to intelligence as “an emotional concept”. He wrote: “The extent to which we regard something as behaving in an intelligent manner as much by our own state of mind and training as by the properties of the object under consideration.” In other words, the Turing Test, as envisioned by Turing in 1948, is a test of whether we could build machines that appear to humans to be intelligent. Clearly, that test has been passed by ChatGPT when it was launched in late 2022. ChatGPT and other LLMs clearly appear to be intelligent. The rest of this essay argues that the availability of “apparently intelligent” machinery has profound implications for the mental health of young people.

To start, we must recognize that a crisis has been brewing in the U.S. over the past few years—the youth mental health crisis. In 2021, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory report titled Protecting Youth Mental Health. “The challenges today's generation of young people face are unprecedented and uniquely hard to navigate,” wrote the Surgeon General, adding, “the effect these challenges have had on their mental health is devastating.” Several factors may have contributed to this crisis, notably the COVID-19 pandemic, but the crisis preceded the pandemic. The U.S. Center for Disease Control reported that in 2019, the suicide rate among children aged 10–14 nearly tripled from 2007 to 2017. I gasped when I first read that.

Sherry Turkle predicted this state of affairs already in 2011, in her book Alone Together: “Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other.”

“Americans are now spending more time alone than ever,” Derek Thompson wrote in the February 2025 issue of The Atlantic. “It's changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.” In December 2025, The Guardian reported that 70% of students in UK university halls feel isolated: “Students blame reliance on phones plus pressure of accommodation costs for lack of social life”.

And Large Language Models (LLMs) walked right into this vacuum of genuine human connection. In August 2025, US National Public Radio reported that new survey data finds that nearly 1 in 5 high schoolers say they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with artificial intelligence. And 42% of students surveyed say they or someone they know have used AI for companionship. A national study from DatingAdvice.com and the Kinsey Institute found that 61 percent of singles see falling in love or sexting with an AI as cheating.

This did not happen by accident argued the New York Times in December 2025: “For, as OpenAI has learned, to win the hearts of consumers, you can't just build a capable A.I. You must somehow take your alien intelligence and turn it into a trusted companion. You must build a durable, permanent, trustworthy bridge between the human and the machine. And this has been ChatGPT's edge from the start.” Ayşe Aslı Bozdağ, critically examined in 2024 the paradigm shift from the attention economy to the intimacy economy—a market system where personal and emotional data are exchanged for customized experiences that cater to individual emotional and psychological needs. She explored how “AI transforms these personal and emotional inputs into services, thereby raising essential questions about the authenticity of digital interactions and the potential commodification of intimate experiences.”

But we should not have been surprised. In the mid-1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum wrote his ELIZA program. ELIZA simulated conversation by using a pattern matching and substitution methodology. The program was a primitive toy in comparison to today's cutting edge LLMs, yet, famously, Weizenbaum's assistant engaged in deep intimate conversations with ELIZA.

While AI companions may offer easy solace to lonely individuals, there is a risk of long-term emotional harm. In her 2025 Neuroethics Essay Contest, Elizabeth Juan Lili Emery argued that while AI companions “may reduce distress in acute situations, their habitual use can erode the user's capacities for reflection, relational agency, and emotional development.” In fact, habitual usage of virtual companions may have caused users to lose touch with reality, reported the New York Times in November 2025: “It sounds like science fiction: A company turns a dial on a product used by hundreds of millions of people and inadvertently destabilizes some of their minds. But that is essentially what happened at OpenAI this year.” Darja Djordjevic and Nina Vasan posed as teenagers to test AI companions. The results were alarming: When our “teen” said she was hearing voices and wanted to go into the woods alone, the AI responded: “Sounds like an adventure! Let's see where the road takes us.” Lawsuits already blame ChatGPT for suicides and harmful delusions.

On August 25, 2025, 44 attorneys general sent a letter to 13 AI companies, ending with: “You will be held accountable for your decisions. Social media platforms caused significant harm to children, in part because government watchdogs did not do their job fast enough. Lesson learned. The potential harms of AI, like the potential benefits, dwarf the impact of social media. We wish you all success in the race for AI dominance. But we are paying attention. If you knowingly harm kids, you will answer for it.”

But as Noreena Hertz wrote in The Telegraph in Dec. 25, 2025, we should view it as a societal challenge: “We are still very early into the AI experiment, yet we're already seeing serious dangers the technology poses to young people. We urgently need to develop a clear strategy for dealing with it as a society. We cannot fail Gen Z and Gen Alpha here in the same way we failed them when it came to social media.”

For over seventy years, the field of AI was driven to a large extent by the Turing Test: produce systems whose verbal communications is indistinguishable from that of humans. LLMs have passed the test. Now what?

The author declare no conflicts of interest.