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Teenagers, the next generation with a brilliant world, and the new future leaders of every different sector. The teenage years are the brilliant years to shape your ways to navigate the world and make the choices for a more progressive future for yourselves.

As per crossrivertherapy, in the United States, approximately 70% of teenagers are addicted to social media. It also shows that women are more addicted to social media than men.

The ways AI can be dangerous to teenagers are:

• The teenager’s emotions can be manipulated with AI systems in a variety of ways, such as by making them more likely to buy a product or service or agreeing to a certain course of action. Personalized content is designed specially to elicit certain emotions such as excitement, fear, or anger, and it is portrayed in a powerful way on social media to trigger impulsive decisions or risky behaviors.
• Teenagers are also becoming more isolated and disconnected from others due to their addiction to chatbots and other social media platforms. Teenagers are failing to develop and maintain healthy relationships.
• Unrealistic expectations among teenagers due to AI systems that are capable of solving various problems lead to disappointment and frustration when they fail to meet the perfect result or demand.
• Teenagers are developing unhealthy attachments to chatbots or AI voice services, expecting they will always get what they want or have control over everything. Which is something that doesn’t work in the real world. It can lead to anxiety and other various problems, leading to coping problems beyond what they thought they were capable of.
• AI systems to create new forms of cyberbullying or spreading misinformation and develop new addictive products and services targeting teenagers.

However, there are different ways for parents, educators, and policymakers to protect teenagers from the dangers of AI:

• The risks of AI need to be made aware among educated teenagers who try to manipulate their emotions or existential problems, but we need to be reminded not to create fear among them.
• The use of AI safely and responsibly for teenagers, identify harmful AI applications and avoid them completely even though they have high addictive potential or are a profitable market.
• Online activities need to be monitored for both teenagers and the organization that is luring them to such harmful and potentially volatile content.
• The use of AI needs to be regulated with supporting policies to protect teenagers’ privacy and safety and ensure that AI systems are used responsibly and ethically.
• Teenagers may think that AI can support their entrepreneurial skills completely and turn them into successful people within a few days, which can lead them to be discouraged that AI cannot guarantee 100% success.

The main area is to handle the disappointment and frustration due to high expectations that AI can do anything and that whatever results they provide or the information being analyzed are completely correct. The data or the trend that teenagers follow, believing it is the truth of the world, often leads to a huge negative impact on their mindset to digest the fact that a program based on bits and bytes won’t always provide accurate information.

And most importantly, it is not the way the world operates in real-world circumstances. It also leads to the early development of a pattern of being in control and knowing everything. The way it shows that you are in complete control of them makes it quite problematic for them to experience that they are not in control of everything.

Sources:- Pew Research Centre