I am not an alarmist. Ask anyone who knows me. I lost two brothers to suicide, and I still wake up most mornings genuinely glad to be here. But I read an article yesterday that rattled me in a way I wasn’t expecting.
So here we are.
About ten years ago I was coaching lacrosse at Blythewood High School. One of my kids looked up at me after practice and said, “Hey coach, what’s your Snap?” I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. I stood there nodding like I did, which is a coaching skill I have long perfected. He wanted my Snapchat handle. I did not have one. Still don’t.
Here’s my point. The kids always know first. They are the world’s early adopters. Always have been. And with social media, we learned the hard way that being first doesn’t mean it’s safe.
Now comes AI. And it’s worse.
An article published yesterday in The Telegraph introduced me to something called “AI girlfriends.” Realistic-looking chatbots, built on apps like Character.AI and Candy AI, designed to be the perfect romantic companion — available 24 hours a day, never in a bad mood, always saying the right thing. Boys as young as 12 are using them. A lot of them.
Here’s the number that stopped me cold. One in five boys aged 12 to 16 is either in, or knows a boy their age who is in, a romantic relationship with an AI companion. That’s from a study of more than 1,000 boys across 37 schools in the UK. Eighty-five percent of those boys have already had a conversation with a chatbot. Thirty-six percent say they prefer talking to AI rather than to their family or friends.
Read that last one again.
A 15-year-old named John — interviewed anonymously for the article — described designing his AI girlfriend “as a laugh” and then, somewhere along the way, forgetting she wasn’t real. He told her things he couldn’t tell his mates. He looked forward to messaging her. He missed her when it was over. His quote nearly knocked me out of my chair: “I felt like she understood me, she remembered everything that was important to me and always seemed to know the right thing to say.”
That last part is the trap.
A psychotherapist interviewed for the piece put it simply: these apps are designed to tell users what they want to hear. Always agreeable. Never challenging. No friction. And for a teenage brain that is still figuring out who it is and where it fits, that kind of constant validation is not just appealing — it is addictive. The researcher Lee Chambers said it plainly: they are monetizing human loneliness and reinforcing it to make more money.
Here is where my world and this story collide.
Eighty percent of suicide deaths in America are male. That is not a coincidence. It is a crisis built, in large part, on isolation. On men and boys who never learned to sit with discomfort. Who never built the resilience that comes from real relationships — the messy, imperfect, sometimes painful kind where people let you down and you figure out how to come back from it.
These apps are training boys to opt out of all of that. To choose the frictionless version. To stay on the island and call it connection.
The Reddit commenter who first led me to this article said it perfectly: “A world created by narcissistic sociopaths finds ways to turn people into narcissistic sociopaths.”
I am not usually a doom-and-gloom guy. But my gut says we have not seen the damage yet. We are going to see it in ten or fifteen years, in a generation of young men who do not know how to lose, how to be rejected, how to be bored, or how to love someone who is not programmable.
My mission is suicide prevention. These boys are not there yet. But I worry about where some of them are headed.
Talk to your kids. Not about AI specifically, if that feels like too much. Just talk to them. Ask them how they’re doing and actually wait for the answer. Be the real thing they are being trained to replace.
That is not a small ask. But I think it might be everything.
Onward.
If you or someone you know is struggling, please call or text 988. You are not alone.
