Quarter of Young Dutch AI Users Confide More in Chatbots Than in Friends
New Dutch panel research puts numbers on how far conversational AI has moved into young people's private lives. In an EenVandaag survey of approximately 1,100 opinion-panel members aged 16 to 34, 51 percent of AI users said they discuss personal matters with the chatbot: dating, social situations, mental health. Nearly a quarter, 23 percent, said they share more with the chatbot than with their own friends and family.
The pattern is confiding, not just querying. A tool positioned for homework help and drafting emails is functioning, for a meaningful minority, as the primary outlet for emotional life. That happens without clinical oversight, without the confidentiality rules that bind a GP or therapist, and on infrastructure operated by foreign platforms.
For Dutch policymakers and health institutions, this lands in the gap between AI policy and youth mental health policy, two files that rarely share a desk. Watch whether the government's AI-literacy push and the ongoing chatbot debates in the Tweede Kamer treat emotional dependence as a design issue or leave it as a parenting problem.