What Teens Are Doing With Those Role-Playing Chatbots

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Quentin first downloaded a character chatbot when he was 13. He remembers thinking, “Wow, this is garbage, but fun.”

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What Teens Are Doing With Those Role-Playing Chatbots

Harassing bots with “funny violence.” Confiding about a broken heart. Chatting with a block of cheese. Filling a void of loneliness.

Quentin first downloaded a character chatbot when he was 13. He remembers thinking, “Wow, this is garbage, but fun.”

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By

Kashmir Hill

Photographs by

Frances F. Denny

April 4, 2026

When Quentin was 13, he kept seeing ads on YouTube for Talkie, an app with “countless A.I.s eager to speak with you.” The ads were weird, he said, and sometimes crude. One Talkie ad featured an animated girl named Valerie who “likes to fart on you sometimes.”

That was in 2023, the year of the social chatbot invasion, when a slew of smartphone apps offering “A.I. chat” were released, most rated 13+. Their online ads were ubiquitous and

unsettling

enough that young people

complained about them

, with one teen streamer

accusing

Talkie, for example, of “promoting sexual chats with A.I.s to a bunch of children who watch YouTube.”

The marketing worked on Quentin. He eventually downloaded Talkie for free and gave it a try. “Wow, this is garbage, but fun,” he recalled thinking.

For the next two years, Quentin spent a lot of time talking to chatbot characters, first on Talkie and then on other services, such as Character.AI, a start-up founded in 2021 by former Google engineers.

He enjoyed harassing the bots with “funny violence,” he said, like running them over with a lawn mower, inflicting harm in an environment with no actual victims. He also created elaborate story lines in which he fought or flirted with his favorite characters. Occasionally, he would indulge in what he called “devious acts” on a platform now called PolyBuzz that offered more sexually explicit chatbots. They included “your drunk friend Ishimi” and “Cat girl maid,” with the tagline, “Do anything with her!”

Quentin would talk with the chatbots for an hour or so after school and for stretches of up to five hours on weekends. It was his go-to entertainment when he was bored, or when he was feeling down, such as a time that a close friend at school betrayed his trust.

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