AI products can meet narrow safety standards while still causing broader cultural harm, from emotional dependence on chatbots and weakened learning habits to the addictive social-media systems that consume people’s time. Sam Hiner and Emma Leiken argue that technology companies should be held to a much higher standard: proving that AI supports learning and critical thinking, limiting features that encourage unhealthy dependence, and accepting independent scrutiny of how their products affect relationships and human judgment.
Safety is not enough
A teenager who develops an unhealthy attachment to an AI companion may never become the subject of a lawsuit or news report, except in the most egregious cases. The same is true of students who rely on chatbots to write all their papers, or young people who measure their lives against social-media feeds designed to inspire envy and keep them under surveillance. Even when a product satisfies narrow safety requirements, it can still degrade the culture in ways that do not make headlines.
A limited definition of success centered on safety is politically convenient for the technology industry, and companies actively promote it. Preventing catastrophic events is good for business because it can reduce lawsuits and potentially ease regulatory pressure. Addressing the daily effects of addiction, however, would require measures that pose a significant threat to companies’ bottom lines. That could mean adding friction to products or limiting engagement and features that produce negative outcomes, including attention-hacking algorithms.
Instead, technology companies have been supporting legislation focused on harms they are already under direct pressure to address. In 2026, for example, Google supported bills to regulate AI chatbots in multiple states. The legislation mandates basic protections against sexual content and the promotion of self-harm, requiring technology companies to establish those protections in any case. It also includes a broad carve-out that would exempt some of the most popular services.
The passage of such bills allowed lawmakers to claim a victory for safety, while efforts to pass stronger laws preventing children from becoming emotionally dependent on AI failed. This strategy has worked in states such as Nebraska, producing legislation heavily influenced by industry while sidelining measures intended to hold corporations accountable.
Lessons from social media
We have already experienced versions of this dynamic with social media. Around the world, people now spend an average of two hours or more online each day, including time on social-media platforms. That time is quietly taken from people’s daily lives and transferred to companies whose profits depend on keeping users engaged.
Few people, other than perhaps some technology-company executives, wanted these algorithms to occupy so much of our waking lives. Their cultural influence may also contribute to violence on a devastating scale. Reporting has linked Meta’s platform to the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar, anti-Muslim riots in Sri Lanka, and the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. The source also points to reporting that someone was said to have called for violence at the time.
The same incentives operate through social-media feeds, shaping how young people in the United States understand politics, their peers, and the wider world.
AI and the erosion of human skills
AI extends this logic into parts of life that social media can influence only indirectly. It can write our thoughts for us and provide a substitute for people on whom we might otherwise rely. According to Common Sense Media research, one-third of teenagers now choose to discuss serious issues with AI companions instead of other people.
Research from MIT researchers found that young people who used ChatGPT to write essays showed reduced brain connectivity during the task. The evidence also indicated that “cognitive debt” persisted after the task was completed. Much remains unknown about the long-term effects, but there is already reason to question whether technologies promoted as improvements to human abilities may erode the habits and relationships that helped people develop those abilities in the first place.
Followed to its logical conclusion, this approach could produce a sterile world of entertainment in which chatbots spare us the difficulties of thinking and of dealing with other people’s emotions—or our own. Anyone who has struggled to write something worth reading or repair a damaged friendship knows what could be lost. People develop judgment through effort and friction, and learn to live with others by recognizing that those people have needs and opinions of their own.
Demanding more than minimum protections
Society should demand a minimum level of safety from technology companies, but it should demand substantially more than that. Technology companies and school districts should have to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that AI improves learning and critical thinking before making it a fixture in classrooms.
Companies should be prohibited from designing companions that pretend to be conscious or profess love to users. They should also face independent scrutiny of how their systems affect relationships and people’s ability to think for themselves. Companies that have introduced their products into nearly every part of modern life have an obligation that goes far beyond avoiding the next headline.
Sam Hiner is co-founder and executive director of the Young People’s Alliance, where he coordinated a coalition of advocates that helped pass laws regulating AI companions in eight states in 2026, including California’s SB1119. Hiner graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2025 and was nominated in 2026 for the Forbes Social Influence List for people under 30.
Emma Leiken is executive director of HopeLab’s Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund, which has raised more than $9 million for youth-led technology-accountability efforts. She teaches technology policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Leiken previously served as TikTok’s global head of youth safety and well-being policy and worked on responsible technology at Omidyar Network.
Source: www.technologyreview.com