“A mom thought her daughter was texting friends before her suicide. It was an AI chatbot.”
This headline is one of multiple disturbing news reports linking chatbots to deaths, violence, and sexually explicit conversations with teens. According to Pew Research, 1 in 3 teens use chatbots—which is more than parents realize. Another study reported that 1 in 5 teens has been romantically involved with AI or knows someone who has.
Parents need to talk with teens about AI. More than ever, families must disciple young people to use technology wisely from the foundation of God’s Word.
Here are five questions to help.
1. Do you use chatbots, and what do you like about them?
Some variation of this question can get the conversation rolling. Even if you’ve never seen your teen messaging a chatbot at home, they may be using chatbots for classroom purposes at school or have a chatbot app on their phone. Both of these scenarios have happened in cases where teens committed suicide under the influence of chatbots they’d been using without their parents’ knowledge.
2. Do you think of AI more as a tool, a friend, an advisor, or something else?
If your teen views AI as a tool, help them understand how AI differs from other tools like calculators, as this article unpacks. If they view AI as a friend or confidant, talk about how AI contrasts to humans made in God’s image. Unlike AI, for example, humans have self-aware minds that can truly understand things, consciences that reflect our moral accountability, and souls that will exist forever. We also have hearts that can feel emotions, care for others, worship God, and form relationships.
That final difference is especially crucial because, according to a study from 2025, many people who end up in artificial “relationships” with chatbots didn’t expect to get attached. They started out using AI chatbots as a tool for information or productivity. But then, they began sharing their feelings with the chatbot or otherwise getting emotionally involved.
This pattern has already unfolded in the lives and deaths of at least three young men, according to the lawsuits linking AI to their suicides. So encourage teens to take their feelings to you, to the Lord, and to other trusted, godly humans instead of to chatbots.
3. What do you think are some other limitations of AI?
Remind teens that AI is not the authority for truth and that we can’t trust everything it says. AI models are biased by the worldview assumptions in their training data, which can come from unreliable internet sources. Chatbots show a knack for making up false information. They frequently misquote the Bible. And too often, they’re programmed to tell us what we want to hear—even if that means giving us bad advice.
Chatbots echo, affirm, and amplify the things we say out of our sin-prone hearts. These tendencies of chatbots are goading people down destructive thinking pathways, wreaking havoc in relationships, and leaving lives in shambles. By being aware of these pitfalls, teens can better know how to steer clear of them.
4. What do you think are the main benefits and risks of how you’re using AI?
For example, how might AI be influencing your thinking or your ability to think, reason, and communicate for yourself? These are skills society cannot afford to lose. Yet multiple studies have begun to document the negative effects of AI dependency on the human brain, displacing our abilities to think critically, learn new information, and solve problems ourselves. On the bright side, a recent Gallup survey found that many Gen Zers are realizing that AI tools have potential to adversely impact their learning.
5. As a family, what guidelines will keep our uses of AI on track?
Thankfully, God’s Word gives families practical truth for thinking about new technologies. When we use technologies like AI in line with God’s designs, commands, and purposes for us, we can better flourish as the humans God created us to be. Answers in Genesis is here to help, producing free resources to help you equip your family with biblical guidance for using AI and other new technologies.
Summing Up
As recent headlines reveal, young people desperately need biblical guidance for navigating the AI revolution. Parents can begin this process by asking questions to discern how their teens approach AI, using the conversation to help youth better understand, think biblically about, and wisely handle AI. That’s possible because God’s Word gives families the truth they need for faithful flourishing in an AI age. Now that’s good news.
