Fact or fallacy? Today’s youths don’t worry about privacy — they share everything online and don’t care what is done with it.
How about this one? Teens mostly use AI to cheat on their schoolwork.
The generation that is growing up with the explosion of artificial intelligence chatbots, mental health apps and, yes, homework helpers must also grapple with the sometimes wrongheaded assumptions of adults, even those who are developing and deploying the technology.
For Tech Week in San Francisco, ImpactAlpha has joined with Hopelab, a nonprofit that is part of Omidyar Group, and Headstream, a program of SecondMuse, to bring together a panel of young people to bust some of the myths. Today’s event will explore youth “co-creation” of approaches and technologies to advance the mental health and wellbeing of young people (there’s still time to RSVP for today’s event, “Youth Mental Well-Being and AI,” from 6-8 pm, at the American Bookbinders Museum.)
Sometimes, the prevailing myths contradict each other and err on both sides of an issue. For example, many people believe “Young people are unaware or unprepared for the challenges/dangers of AI,” at the same time that “Young people are digital-native and thus know how to access and use AI.”
“A lot of adults tend to make assumptions about teens and our use of technology,” said Kaelyn Tan, a member of the city’s youth advisory committee in Mountain View, Calif., and a participant in Headstream’s innovation program, who will join today’s panel. “I think it would be helpful if we were asked the questions about how adult allies could support us, and how systems can start being more youth-centered.”
Competitive advantage
The arrival of AI amid a surge in anxiety, depression and other mental health challenges among young people that began even before the Covid pandemic has spurred a raft of startups with tech-driven approaches to complex psychological and emotional issues.
“Youth co-creation isn’t just an ethical imperative, it’s a competitive advantage,” Headstream youth co-creators Tanvi Kale and Cynthia Arenas wrote in a July post on the organization’s website. Young people, they said, “can spot forced ‘mental wellness’ content in a heartbeat and will uninstall anything that feels inauthentic or irrelevant.” The flip side, they argued, is that authentic co-creation can lead to higher engagement, stronger user retention and more organic advocacy.
Headstream’s youth collective brings together entrepreneurs and youth leaders to co-design digital products and tools. For example, youths can help define what “informed consent” means to a teenager, flag blind spots in data sets help make risk alerts feel helpful, not invasive, Kale and Arenas wrote.
Another participant in today’s panel, Nick Peatfield, a co-founder of the conversational chatbot HeyBro, said conversations with youth co-creators changed the company’s approach to privacy. The service, developed out of the Vancouver-based R&D lab Lyminal, offers telephone-based access to an AI chatbot to help young men navigate stress, transitions or loneliness.
“I was surprised how in tune they were with the privacy concerns, especially the idea that the documents are going to the cloud and back,” Peatfield says. “So how do we try and change some elements so we could be privacy-first.”
Youth voice playbook
Hopelab Ventures, with funding from Omidyar Group, has invested in almost two dozen youth mental health tech startups. The nonprofit venture fund typically writes checks ranging between $125,000 and $1 million in pre-seed and other early stage funding rounds (see, “AI-driven solutions to streamline mental health services for struggling youths”).
Hopelab and Character Lab, through a partnership with Harvard’s Center for Digital Thriving and youth engagement nonprofit In Tandem, developed the “Youth Voice Playbook: Engaging Youth in Research,” a guide for researchers on how to include young people in research that impacts them.
“We’re investing in companies that help young people with eating disorders, with moderate to severe anxiety, with a whole range of things that are really clinical in nature,” Hopelab’s Margaret Laws said on ImpactAlpha’s Agents of Impact podcast in June (disclosure: Hopelab supports ImpactAlpha’s coverage of Healthy Youth).
“There are also some interventions that we want to look at more upstream, things that help young people find purpose, that help young people feel like they’re contributing, that help them build connections and support and relationships.”
Hopelab, alongside philanthropic backers including Prince Harry and Megan Markle’s Archewell Foundation, have poured more than $4.5 million since 2023 into the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund, which supports youth-led organizations that are working at the intersection of responsible tech and mental health, AI ethics, online safety and climate change.
“We get the benefit of learning from all of those organizations in the ways that AI can be used to improve access to services like mental and wellbeing for their generation,” Laws said. “How do we actually learn from young people who are using them about what they feel about AI, where they believe regulation should be, and what they experience as sort of the guardrails that they think should be in place?
The co-creation opportunity is global. Grand Challenges Canada, one of the most active investors in global mental health, launched the Being Initiative in 2023 across a dozen priority countries, including five in Africa, to provide financial grants and non-financial technical support. One requirement: at least 50% of key staff must be 35 years old, or younger.
“The Being Initiative is going beyond investing in single solutions and trying to address some of the more systems-level barriers that have the potential to enable mental health innovations to scale,” Grand Challenges’ Brittany Dudar told ImpactAlpha.
In their post, Headstream’s Kale and Arenas say authentic youth engagement transforms both the products and the people involved.
“When we bring youth into the driver’s seat, something shifts,” Arenas says. “The tools become less abstract and more grounded, more creative, more authentic. And when we’re part of building these solutions, we also get to reclaim youth power.”
