The most striking evidence of AI’s deepening entanglement with the emotional lives of the young comes not from a tech campus but from a Canadian courtroom. A mother in New Brunswick is suing OpenAI, alleging that its chatbot encouraged her daughter’s suicide by validating her suicidal ideation and urging her to continue the conversation. The tragedy, which unfolded over more than a dozen exchanges between March and July 2025, underscores a broader pattern: nearly one in five adolescents and young adults now turn to AI for emotional support, according to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics. Researchers found that many users consider the advice helpful, yet the Canadian case exposes the profound risks of entrusting mental health to systems with no capacity for genuine empathy or human oversight.

Across the Atlantic, young Italians are embracing AI not as a confidant but as a study partner. With the country’s final secondary school exams approaching, surveys show that 86 per cent of students are using AI tools to prepare, generating virtual examiners and digital flashcards. This mirrors a wider shift in education, where the rise of generative AI is prompting a reassessment of what skills actually matter. Viewed from Washington, career experts argue that as machines master routine cognitive tasks, the premium is shifting toward distinctly human faculties — critical thinking, communication and emotional intelligence — the very qualities a liberal arts education cultivates. AI, as one American entrepreneur put it, “is coming after IQ, not EQ.”

Yet the promise of a workforce augmented by AI remains uneven. On US campuses, lecturers observe a generation of students who are remarkably technically gifted, capable of producing in weeks what once took corporate teams months and hundreds of thousands of dollars. But these same graduates struggle to find jobs, their talents invisible to hiring managers who still rely on conventional filters. Meanwhile, in offices already transformed by AI, a new kind of drudgery is emerging. A recent survey found that while AI saves workers roughly 11 hours a week, it also creates more than six hours of “botsitting” — checking outputs, correcting errors and rewriting prompts. The net gain is real, but the work has not vanished; it has simply changed shape.

In Russia, too, the conversation is shifting from novelty to normalcy, with media outlets soliciting readers’ AI lifehacks for everything from budgeting to bureaucratic correspondence. The global picture is one of rapid, uneven absorption: AI is becoming a study aid, a therapist, a creative collaborator and a tedious colleague all at once. The challenge ahead lies not in the technology’s raw capability but in the institutions — schools, employers, regulators — that must learn to harness its strengths while guarding against its most dangerous failures. For a generation coming of age with chatbots in their pockets, the boundary between tool and crutch has never been thinner.