Young Canadians want AI companies to make their chatbots less addictive: report

OTTAWA – A new report focusing on the perspectives of young people says the government should order AI companies to take steps to curb the addictive aspects of their AI chatbots.

It’s one of a series of recommendations made by youth between the ages of 17 and 23 who took part in roundtables across the country.

Participants presented the report — published by McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy and Simon Fraser University’s Dialogue on Technology Project — and its recommendations on Parliament Hill on Thursday.

Maddie Case, a youth fellow with the McGill centre, introduced the 25 young people who developed the chatbot recommendations.

She said they talked about “the apps they used at two in the morning when they couldn’t sleep. About the friendly ears they found between AI systems when human ones felt so far away. About the moment they realized that they’d started turning to AI for things they’d never needed help with before.”

Case said the youth also discussed what it felt like to “use a tool that has been built deliberately to keep you coming back, not necessarily because it’s good for you, but because your attention is worth money.”

They also talked about encountering problematic content and how they had nowhere to turn if something went wrong in their engagements with chatbots, Case said.

One of those participants was Laryssa McGlashon, who said she found chatbots to be very addictive.

“I would be the first to put up my hand and say that I use chatbots probably more than I want to,” she said.

Yusuf Zawahir, who also took part in the Toronto roundtable, said his biggest concern about chatbots is their impact on mental health, adding that people in his generation use chatbots as therapists.

Graeme Lavrence said he worries about cognitive off-loading and the impact of AI on critical thinking skills. He said he worries about how “the everyday use of these tools for daily tasks can harm your own critical thinking skills and the effects that it then has for polarization and democratic decay.”

The report says AI platforms should be required to “address the addictive design of AI chatbots by requiring measures such as content filters and optional data cache deletion, and explicitly providing users with the ability to determine levels of responsiveness and conversationality.”

The report notes that the participants came of age with AI technology.

“In Toronto, participants reflected at length on the role of addictive design in AI chatbots. They argued that the sycophancy of many chatbot systems is intended to sustain interaction, cultivate dependency, and maximize time-on-platform,” it says.

The report says chatbots tend to reinforce users’ beliefs and emotional states and “generate the false experience of being understood.” It adds that those effects are the result of deliberate design choices made in the pursuit of profit.

“Several participants described their own experiences of cognitive off-loading or emotional reliance that they found difficult to reverse, and linked these dynamics to design choices they had never consented to,” the report says.

Among other recommendations, the report says social media platforms and search engines should be required to offer easy ways to opt out of integrated AI technologies.

It also calls for a new government body that could evaluate systems, audit algorithms and enforce safety standards.

Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon and Culture Minister Marc Miller took part in a panel discussion at Thursday’s event. Solomon praised the group’s recommendations on AI chatbots, saying they are “all really important aspects of this that we’re looking closely at.”

The federal government is working on separate pieces of legislation to address online privacy and online harms, and has also promised a national AI strategy.

The promised online harms bill could include age restrictions for access to social media, like the ban for those under 16 introduced in Australia last year. The government is also considering whether to include AI chatbots in any ban.

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said over the weekend his government will move to ban children from using social media accounts and artificial intelligence chatbots.

Miller said Wednesday regulation of social media falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government. But Solomon told reporters after the event Thursday that he is not concerned about provinces moving ahead with a ban.

“They have a lot of ground to cover and we’re working very closely,” he said.

The report says the participants felt excluded from governance processes on digital issues.

“This was particularly salient in discussions of age assurance, where the vulnerability of children and young people is routinely invoked as a justification for regulatory intervention, yet young people themselves remain largely absent from the decision-making spaces where those interventions are designed,” the report says.

The report flagged privacy concerns around age verification technologies and called for a standardized age-verification system that would “restrict users’ access to generative AI platforms through the creation of an anonymized digital token system.”

The organizers behind the report held four consultation events between November 2025 and March 2026 and 100 young people took part.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 30, 2026.