By Marcus Carter
Publication Date: 2026-04-16 00:11:00
In 2022, the founders of chatbot startup Character.AI launched a platform where anyone could create interactive characters powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
The app exploded quickly, quickly growing to more than 20 million users who created more than 10 million chatbot characters.
Many of the users who created these characters were young people – until they weren’t. In November 2025, Character.AI banned users under the age of 18 due to increasing public and legal pressure related to youth suicides related to its use. The decision came after a series of attempts to improve youth safety, including parental controls and stricter content filters.
The ban is an attempt to protect young people from potential harm. But the more creative, playful, and emotional AI experiments they conducted were also silenced.
Our new research, published in the proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2026 CHI conference, captures and preserves the new ways young people…
