Generative AI has already become part of daily life for many teenagers in the United States. A report from Common Sense Media, based on survey answers from US parents and high schoolers between March and May 2024, shows that adoption is broad, fast-moving, and often poorly understood by the adults around them.
Teen AI use is already mainstream
Seven in 10 teenagers in the United States have used generative AI tools, according to the report. That includes text generators and chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini, search engines with AI-generated results, image generators such as DALL-E, and video generators.
More than half of the students surveyed had used AI text generators and chatbots, as well as search engines that return AI-generated results. Around 34 percent had used image generators like DALL-E, and 22 percent had used video generators.
The findings also suggest that teen adoption is accelerating. Common Sense Media released an earlier report this June, based on responses from the end of 2023, in which only around half the respondents had used generative AI. The newer survey places US teenagers closer to peers in the UK, where the Office of Communications found late last year that four in five teenagers used generative AI tools.
Homework is the biggest reason teens turn to AI
The most common reason teens gave for using AI was school-related. More than half reported using it for "homework help," mainly for "brainstorming ideas." Older teens were more likely than younger ones to use AI this way.
Schoolwork was not the only use case. The second most-common reason was boredom, followed by translating content from one language to another. One in five teens had used generative AI tools to joke around with friends.
That range matters because it shows that teenagers are not treating generative AI as a single-purpose homework machine. They are experimenting with it across practical, social, and personal situations. For schools and families, that makes the conversation more complicated than simply deciding whether AI should be allowed on assignments.
Schools are sending mixed signals
The report points to a major gap in school guidance. Six in 10 teens said their school either did not have AI rules, or they did not know what those rules were. Nearly the same number of teenagers reported using AI without their teacher's permission as the number who said they used it with their educator's blessing.
Parents also reported little communication from schools. More than 80 percent said that their child's school "had not communicated" anything about generative AI. Only 4 percent reported schools banning generative AI.
"We're seeing an almost paralysis from schools," says Common Sense head of research Amanda Lenhart.
When teachers did address AI directly, the report suggests that students responded. Lenhart said students who received instructions from educators were more likely to understand how the technology worked and more likely to check whether it was hallucinating or producing factually accurate sentences.
"Teenagers really listen and learn," Lenhart says. "It makes a big difference."
That finding is important because it shifts the focus from whether teens are using AI to whether they are being taught how to evaluate it. The report does not describe a settled classroom standard, but it does show that silence leaves students to figure out the technology on their own.
Parents often do not know what their kids are doing
One of the report's clearest findings is the gap between teen behavior and parent awareness. Only 37 percent of parents with kids using AI tools knew that their children were using them. Nearly a quarter of parents with kids using AI tools had wrongly assumed their children were not using them.
Most parents had not discussed AI with their kids. At the same time, nearly half of the parents surveyed worried that generative AI tools might harm their children's writing and critical thinking skills.
Parent views were not entirely negative. Parents were split on how AI tools would affect research skills, and more than a quarter said they expected AI tools to help their kids generate ideas. The result is a mixed picture: concern about overreliance, but also recognition that AI may support some kinds of learning.
AI detection raises fairness concerns
The report also highlights a serious equity issue in classrooms. Teachers are more than twice as likely to accuse Black students of using generative AI in their homework when they had not, compared with their white and Latino peers. In those cases, teachers often used AI detection software to flag papers as suspicious.
That finding sits alongside another: Black teens and their parents reported more optimistic feelings about AI in education than their white and Latino peers. The study also suggests that Black teenagers and Latino teenagers are more enthusiastic and experimental users of these tools than their white peers.
Those differences showed up across a wide variety of activities, including creating joking content to share with friends and using AI as a companion. More than a quarter of Black teenagers said they used AI to "keep me company," compared to 11 percent of white teenagers.
Overall, teens reported mixed feelings about AI. But the report shows one point of broad agreement: many students believe learning to use this technology is necessary. More than half said children from kindergarten through grammar school should be required to learn to use generative AI tools.
"I'm sympathetic to administrators and teachers who don't know what to do, but we can see in the data that it's critical to start talking about this," Lenhart says. "You cannot shove it to the side and hope that it goes away."