As accustomed as students are to their cell phones, such as this student at San Mateo’s Bayside Academy in 2024, 89% of the young people in focus groups believe AI has a net negative impact on their mental health.

ChatGPT launched during my junior year of college, quickly becoming the fastest growing technology in human history. I suspected then that AI companies would likely mimic social media’s effective strategy of targeting vulnerable young users in order to build lifelong brand loyalty and harvest massive amounts of data from them to generate profit at the cost of safety. Unfortunately, I was right. 

To better understand the negative impacts of this new wave of technology, I went straight to the source, talking in focus groups with almost 100 Canadian and American youth between the ages of 16 and 24. Unsurprisingly, they aren’t happy. 

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Eighty-nine percent of the young people I spoke to believe AI has a net negative impact on their mental health, while 87% say AI is a net-negative force on education, even as most admit using it for schoolwork because they are convinced they will fall behind academically and professionally if they don’t. 

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“I’ve received a lot of pressure from my parents, from people in my life to be using [AI] more,” a 20-year-old woman from Vancouver, Canada, told me. “If you’re applying to jobs, you have to be using ChatGPT, because everybody is using it … and if you don’t, you’re........

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