Messages in a Digital Bottle: A Youth-Coauthored Perspective on LLM Chatbots and Adolescent Loneliness
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arXiv
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| Autores principales: | , |
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| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866908936368553984 |
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| author | Liu, Jinyao Fu, Di |
| author_facet | Liu, Jinyao Fu, Di |
| contents | Adolescent loneliness is a growing concern in digitally mediated social environments. This work-in-progress presents a youth-authored critical synthesis on chatbots powered by Large Language Model (LLM) and adolescent loneliness. The first author is a 16-year-old Chinese student who recently migrated to the UK. She wrote the first draft of this paper from her lived experience, supervised by the second author. Rather than treating the youth perspective as one data point among many, we foreground it as the primary interpretive lens, grounded in interdisciplinary literature from social computing, developmental psychology, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). We examine how chatbots shape experiences of loneliness differently across adolescent subgroups, including those with anxiety or depression, neurodivergent youth, and immigrant adolescents, and identify both conditions under which they may temporarily reduce isolation and breakdowns that risk deepening it. We derive three population-sensitive design implications. The next phase of this work will expand the youth authorship model to a panel of adolescents across these subgroups, empirically validating the framework presented here. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_03470 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Messages in a Digital Bottle: A Youth-Coauthored Perspective on LLM Chatbots and Adolescent Loneliness Liu, Jinyao Fu, Di Human-Computer Interaction Adolescent loneliness is a growing concern in digitally mediated social environments. This work-in-progress presents a youth-authored critical synthesis on chatbots powered by Large Language Model (LLM) and adolescent loneliness. The first author is a 16-year-old Chinese student who recently migrated to the UK. She wrote the first draft of this paper from her lived experience, supervised by the second author. Rather than treating the youth perspective as one data point among many, we foreground it as the primary interpretive lens, grounded in interdisciplinary literature from social computing, developmental psychology, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). We examine how chatbots shape experiences of loneliness differently across adolescent subgroups, including those with anxiety or depression, neurodivergent youth, and immigrant adolescents, and identify both conditions under which they may temporarily reduce isolation and breakdowns that risk deepening it. We derive three population-sensitive design implications. The next phase of this work will expand the youth authorship model to a panel of adolescents across these subgroups, empirically validating the framework presented here. |
| title | Messages in a Digital Bottle: A Youth-Coauthored Perspective on LLM Chatbots and Adolescent Loneliness |
| topic | Human-Computer Interaction |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03470 |