Restoration, Exploration and Transformation: How Youth Engage Character.AI Chatbots for Feels, Fun and Finding themselves
This research addresses the gap in understanding self-directed youth engagement with generative AI, providing frameworks for designing youth-centered AI futures.
The study analyzed discourse from 4,172 users on Character.AI's Discord to understand how highly-engaged youth (50% aged 13-17, 61.9% female/non-binary, 59% creating their own characters) use AI chatbots for playful, emotional, and creative practices that push platform limits. It developed a framework of three engagement intents (Restoration, Exploration, Transformation) and a taxonomy of seven character archetypes, revealing how youth invent novel roles for AI and exposing misalignments between youth use and current AI experiences.
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.