r/technology • u/WorldTravelerBoss • Jul 15 '26

Artificial Intelligence The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends. Boys as young as 12 are now in romantic ‘relationships’ with chatbots, and it’s affecting how they treat girls in the real world.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/25/schoolboys-ai-girlfriends/
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u/rmslashusr Jul 15 '26

My man, Google is AI now, and they force kindergartners (age 6) to use tablets in public school. Parents have about as much of a choice of “letting” a 12 year old get exposed to AI these days as our parents had a choice of “letting” us learn curse words on the bus.

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u/00owl Jul 15 '26

I learned how to Google things in order to learn. How to sort through BuzzFeed and clickbait in order to find a forum post from a decade ago that had the same problem but no solutions.

Now I try to get my 11 year old to look something up and he doesn't understand why he can't just take the LLM summary as gospel and I don't know how to explain to him that reality isn't that easy.

We're cooked.

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u/valleyman86 Jul 15 '26

You did. But you probably learned how to use a dictionary or an encyclopedia. You learned how to ask the right questions because you were forced to if you wanted any information about what you wanted. Now you can say stupid shit and get away with it. The problem is it’s in everything. You used to have to work to get information. Not every idiot had a platform either.

It’s just a different world and it’s crazy.

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u/BreatheMonkey Jul 15 '26

Who's we? He's your dumb kid. 

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u/Drxero1xero Jul 15 '26

while he teaches his dumb kid the old ways... the other 9/10 dumb kids have folks who don't care enough to teach them shit.

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u/xxs13 Jul 15 '26

I don't know how to explain to him that reality isn't that easy

Only use AI with SOURCES. Ask AI shit with him and then FACT CHECK IT and show him it's wrong 25-50% of the time !

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u/---E Jul 15 '26

I'm with you that I don't trust the AI generated answer either. Do you think our parents thought the same about Wikipedia? "You can't just take the Wikipedia article as gospel"

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u/philippos_ii Jul 15 '26

I mean we were always told from early on to only ever use wiki as a stepping stone to find other sources. It could never be used as truth because of the nature of it. This was from early on. It’s bigger today than it ever has been of course, but yes I would say so. Did everyone treat it that way ? No, but we were definitely told by adults not to trust it 

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u/00owl Jul 15 '26

Smart people still use it as just a starting point and go to the references for serious knowledge

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u/IGotBiggerProblems Jul 15 '26

I learned how to navigate a library to find encyclopedias for research papers. Now I try to tell my 30 year old to pick up a book and she doesn't understand why we can't just Google it.

We were already cooked.

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u/awkreddit Jul 15 '26

Install ublock and look up ai block list. It will effectively remove it

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '26

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u/StandardCake21 Jul 15 '26

In fact, we have a generation of people who grew up with dictionaries and books and they still decided to elect a guy who seriously suggested injecting bleach to fight Covid. Things will be fine or they won't. But AI won't be the deciding factor.

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u/West-Worth-9359 Jul 15 '26

That’s not true. Parents have massive influence over schooling, and if they had the intelligence or motivation to change this they could do it in a week.

The problem is that they don’t think any of this is a big deal because a large majority of them just don’t care.

These are the same parents who give their 10-year-old an iPhone and then wonder why they can’t pass a basic literacy test and spend 90% of their time obsessing over Taylor Swift or being influenced by a Tate brother.

The same parents who don’t know what “Parental Controls” are and will instead lobby for laws to ban all tits from the internet.

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u/Lifeboatb Jul 15 '26

Very nice analogy.

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u/Bodine12 Jul 15 '26

My kids don’t use Google (or the internet). And Chrome books are on the way out in my school district. And regardless, if a kid is using AI in school to the extent they’re developing an AI girlfriend, that school is already toast and the kid is screwed.

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '26

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u/Opus_723 Jul 15 '26

The kid shouldn't have a smartphone either, is the thing.

One family desktop computer in the living room. Boom. 90s childhood achieved.

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u/Bodine12 Jul 15 '26

On what device are they going to download an app?

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u/absentmindedjwc Jul 15 '26

Lol, I said this above and got a ton of downvotes. You can easily download Ollama and a Mistral Small fine-tune and run it on a fairly inexpensive laptop. Easy chatbot.

You can be up and running with a local AI model within about 5 minutes without much real experience in anything but how to google..

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u/KorayA Jul 15 '26

These over corrections are going to be just as detrimental. Kids absolutely need to know how to operate computers and find information. There's a spot between giving them over to the LLMs and making them luddites.

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u/Bodine12 Jul 15 '26

Yes they do. But they’re not developing those skills from pointing and clicking on a tablet and using Google.

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u/IBetThisIsTakenToo Jul 15 '26

Yeah, people don’t remember what it’s like to be a kid. You still have a clever human mind, and you have all day to scheme and plot with each other on how to thwart the adults trying to stop you from doing what you want.