"One in five teenagers has an AI girlfriend." That's the headline that's been ripping through the internet — and it's also not quite what the research says. Josh and Will dig into where this viral stat actually comes from, why the real numbers are messier than the headline, and whether parents should actually be worried.From Clippy jokes and AOL Instant Messenger nostalgia to a genuinely unsettling hypothetical about a 12-year-old learning to "relate" through an AI that's really just a mirror of themselves, this one goes deep. We dig into the UK research and Common Sense Media studies behind the stat, why people give their AI tools human names, and what's actually different about this generation's relationship with chatbots versus the bots we grew up with.

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