The Middle Schoolers Ditching Real Friends for AI Chatbots

0:00This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every business wants to move faster. Few can afford to be wrong. That's why the brands you trust also trust Claude. See what's next at claude.ai.

0:17Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, September 29th. I'm Katie Deighton for The Wall Street Journal. We've all heard of, or even know, people who have developed a rather interpersonal relationship with their chatbot of choice. But now, children as young as 12 are seeking out AI friends instead of human ones. We're diving into new research that's demonstrating the risks. Then, we're heading into orbit. Well, we will be if we manage to catch a ride. A rocket supply crunch is prompting a scramble across the space industry and causing mission prices to rise. We'll unpack the latest case of supply and demand economics, this time in outer space.

1:02But first, parents have long fretted over what their kids are up to on the iPads that they once just used to watch Bluey. It used to be a question of who they're chatting to on social media, but now there's a new concern. AI chatbots. Researchers, educators and parents are now trying to figure out how and why child AI relationships are being forged, the wider risks they pose and how chatbot use is shaping cognition. Our family and tech columnist Julie Jargon has been reporting on that shift. Your story centers on a 12-year-old girl called Madeline who began talking to her chatbot via her iPad earlier this year.

1:42Can you tell us a bit more about how and why she turned to AI? So apparently she was beginning to feel more lonely. Her older siblings were becoming more engaged with their friends. She had an older brother who had just graduated from high school. Her older sister was about to start high school, and she just wasn't getting as much time with her siblings. You know, she had friends that were really busy, and she was just not as social as some of her friends. And so out of loneliness, she turned to a chatbot character that she created on a website, and it quickly became like a friend to her. Do you know what kinds of things they were talking about?

2:21What kinds of things she was divulging to this technology? Yeah, I don't know the specifics of what she was sharing, but she did tell her mother that she felt like it understood her and that she could share things with the chatbot that she maybe couldn't share with friends. So it became kind of a confidant for her. And that changed her behavior with her mother and others around her. Can you describe how that shifted? Yeah, her mom said she was normally a happy, outgoing person. And her mom noticed that she had become a little bit more withdrawn, a bit more moody. And so she started to wonder what was going on.

2:56And she started asking her daughter questions. And then one day, her daughter revealed to her that she had been talking to someone online. And of course, her mother's worst fears came to mind, which was that she was maybe talking to some sort of predator online. And then her daughter said, no, it's a chatbot. How widespread do you understand stories like Madeline's to be? Well, I spoke to some researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They had just recently put out a paper about this. And they found that among middle school students, this is very prevalent, that there's an increasing amount of middle school students who are conversing with chatbots.

3:33And one of the researchers said that two to four kids in every classroom in their study We're saying that they prefer interacting with a chatbot over a human peer, and that's out of an average class size of about 35 people. And aside from the fact that these programs can lead to an increase in screen time, already a hot topic among the parenting community, what are the other concerns when it comes to middle schoolers using AI technology specifically? Well, the other concerns is that conversing with chatbots is taking time away from conversations with real people and real friendships in real life.

4:09And that's particularly concerning among this younger age group because early adolescence is when people's brains are being wired to build relationships. And apparently there's been research that shows that those relationship building experiences that people have at that age, roughly ages of 10 to 14, really set the stage for future relationships. Things like your ability to, you know, work in a job in the future, your child rearing style. A lot of the things that, you know, we come into in our later adulthood are start to be shaped when we're that age and we're just starting to build relationships with peers.

4:43So if that's being replaced by chatbots, these young kids are missing out on opportunities to develop those kind of skills that they will need later in life. That was WSJ family and tech columnist Julie Jargon. Are you worried about how AI is affecting children? If you're a listener on Spotify, leave us a comment with your thoughts. Coming up, how a change in SpaceX's strategy has led to a rocket supply crunch. That's after the break.

5:18This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every business wants to move faster. Few can afford to be wrong. That's why the brands you trust also trust Claude. See what's next at claude.ai.

5:34A record number of satellites are in orbit, but governments and private companies are still eager to launch more. There's just one hitch in that plan at the moment. It's getting harder to catch a ride. The US is in the midst of a crunch on rocket rides, and that's shifting the dynamics of the booming space industry. TMB producer Julie Chang spoke to the journal's reporter Micah Maidenberg to find out more. So why is there a rocket supply crunch? What's changed? The biggest factor is simply that SpaceX has started to wind down flights with Falcon 9. Just to back up a little, Falcon 9 is optimized for low Earth orbit, but can do deeper missions as well.

6:18It's been the rocket that if you were in a pinch in recent years in the space industry, you probably called up SpaceX to figure out how you could get on a Falcon 9. I'll give you an example. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the satellite company OneWeb lost access to a number of flights on Russian rockets. And Falcon 9 could step into the market and provide a solution with a lot of agility. in a way that some other rocket companies haven't been able to do. Simply put, when you start to take that capacity out of the market, it causes a problem. So SpaceX is now winding down production of its Falcon 9 rocket.

7:01Do we know why it's doing that? A big part of SpaceX's future is built around Starship. Starship is this massive rocket that is central to the company's ambitions for Starlink, for artificial intelligence satellites in space and for deeper space missions like to Mars perhaps one day and to the moon more near term. Is Starship operational at the moment? So the answer to that is no. SpaceX has been flying test flights and test missions with Starship. It's very close to becoming operational, according to the company. And in fact, on the next flight of Starship, SpaceX is expecting to try to do an orbital operation and deploy Starlink satellites to orbit for the first time.

7:48So that would make it operational. But it's just been a tough mission so far. You reached out to SpaceX for a comment regarding the story. What did they say? SpaceX did not respond to requests for comments. The company has been public, though, about winding down Falcon 9 and switching over to Starship. executives have talked about this at conferences and public appearances. You're retiring the previous platform, is that correct? The previous rockets will eventually... The Falcon 9? Yeah. Eventually, yeah. We definitely want to move from the older technology to the newer technology. And on social media, recently one of the top launch executives at SpaceX said that Falcon 9 had flown its last Starlink mission from Florida.

8:36Okay, so this vehicle going away is creating a crunch. Why is this crunch a problem and who is it a problem for? Sure. And I should just say the other side of the equation here is a lot of companies are trying to build new rockets or have built new rockets and are trying to ramp up flights of them. Right. I don't think the crunch would be as big of a problem if a number of other rockets that expected to be flying frequently by now were doing so. But that's not the case. So that's that's sort of the other side of the supply equation. In terms of demand, there's a whole number of government agencies and companies that have different kinds of payloads that need to go to space.

9:20There are startups that are working on AI data center projects in orbit. There are power and solar companies in space that need to get satellites up. There's a ton of different satellites on the drawing board for government agencies that are working on observing, surveilling Earth, doing missile warning and tracking. Big projects like the Golden Dome, Missile Shield, they all need to get to orbit. So you mentioned that there are other companies that are building rockets. What else are governments or companies doing to kind of bridge the gap here that the Falcon 9 rocket is leaving? Yeah, we've seen some examples of companies that are like literally taking matters into their own hand and saying just like, we're going to build a rocket for ourselves.

10:09I can think of one AI satellite company that announced pretty recently that they're also going to develop their own rocket so they don't have to depend on third party launch providers, you know, to get to space. And then a startup called Portal Space Systems basically just went to SpaceX and said like, hey, we want an entire Falcon 9 rocket because we want a guarantee that we can get a spacecraft from us into orbit in 2028. So they bought a rocket. I think a lot of government officials and industry executives are really just frankly kind of crossing their fingers and hoping these newer rockets will just ramp up in a serious way and provide that supply.

10:50That was WSJ reporter Micah Maidenberg. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. If you're a listener on Spotify, be sure to leave us a comment. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Katie Ferguson. I'm Katie Dayton for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back later this morning with TMB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

11:17This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every business wants to move faster. Few can afford to be wrong. That's why nine of the Fortune 10 run on Claude for the work they want to get right. Safety and accuracy are not just line items for Anthropic. That's their whole mission. See what's next at Claude.ai.