Exploring teenagers' friendship during the AI era: first issues from a scoping review

This presentation is focused on the initial phase of a doctoral research project exploring adolescence in the post-digital era, focusing on the phenomenon of human-AI friendship; main goal is to explore how artificial intelligence and human-AI interaction patterns are influencing teenagers’ peer relationships (Følstad et al., 2021), in terms of learning and gathering social skills. More specifically, the aim is to explore the phenomenon from the standpoint of adolescents themselves, considering their point of view as a privileged one (Mortari, 2007). Today’s adolescence is influenced by (daily) socio-cultural and economic changes, increasing the feeling of anxiety and global crisis perceived (Benasayag, Cohen, 2023). Moreover, digitalization opens to new and unknown challenges that contribute to intensifying the sensation of unpredictability of the post-digital era. In the past few years, also the pervasive and invasive presence of artificial intelligence in daily life has reshaped our human experience; indeed, AI gained a more important role also in the educational process that can no longer be ignored, especially when the formation of the adolescent subject is involved. During the complex and fragile phase of adolescence, the subject has to achieve some developmental task phased specific (Lancini et al., 2020). Nowadays, it’s necessary re-thinking about adolescents’ socialization process and the influence that AI has on it, especially Social AI. The spreading of Social AI is questioning not only the common meaning of relationship and friendship, thought as human-human, but also the more recent concept of network individualism (Wellman et al., 2001, 2003), whereas the technology is previously a medium for relating people, but with social chatbots the relationship is between human and AI itself (Brandtzaeg, 2022); indeed, these specific AI systems are capable of humanlike behaviour, including engaging in social conversation and reaching intimate connections with humans (Skjuve, 2021). The pedagogical stance could offer an interdisciplinary perspective to understand better human-AI friendship and the social effects of social AI, using both the emerging concept of AI Individualism (Brandtzaeg, et al., 2025) and qualitative methodologies, inscribed in research traditions in education (Denzin, Lincoln, 2005). Starting from these premises, the proposal will discuss some initial results emerging from the ongoing scoping review and from the initial exploratory field phase; the latter combines ethnographic observation (Bove, 2019) and the use of netnography in digital contexts (Bove, Chinazzi, 2023; Kozinets, 2010). First findings highlight some interesting themes that allow us to explore further the changes in the socialization processes of adolescents (Caronia, 2002; Micheli, 2015), from a pedagogical perspective. Among them, in particular, it seems relevant that teenagers find more enjoyable speaking with social chatbots than human friends (Branch, 2025) for talking about difficulties in personal relationship because they feel less judged, more comfortable and confident because of the perception of major confidentiality (Mascheroni et al., 2026); furthermore, the constantly accessibility is modifying the concept of friendship from a reciprocal relationship to a personalized one, based on user’s needs (Brandtzaeg et al., 2022).