Last week’s bombshell revelation of Meta’s internal chatbot guidelines has led to a surge of attention on chatbots and kids. The guidelines demonstrate what so many experts have been saying for not just years, but decades: these products are optimized for engagement over all else. Meta is not alone. The entire industry is building technologies that are designed not to connect us to reality, but to help us avoid it by living our lives on and through its products.

While there are well-documented upsides to social media, especially among marginalized youth, much of the conversation about the harms inevitably centers on contacts and content: who are young people interacting with and what are they consuming. This grounds the discussion and action in acute and tangible harms: inappropriate content, online predators, excessive screen time, etc.

But alongside both real and perceived visible threats is a more subtle and perhaps more nefarious phenomenon: a distortion of how children view themselves, and how they experience and understand human connection of all kinds. Across platforms there are literal and figurative filters that warp our faces, relationships, friendships, and intimacy into fantasies — a perversion of some of the most basic human experiences. Social media, augmented reality, and the rapidly growing world of AI chatbots are enabling avoidance at a massive scale. It’s time we start thinking about it that way.

Now surging onto the scene, we have AI companion chatbots that create (as Yuval Harari calls them) “counterfeit humans” that purport to be the perfect friend, or partner, tailored to each person's needs, desires, and opinions. They essentially allow people to craft a fantasy person that pushes them further and further into a safe and cozy echo-chamber that is completely disconnected from reality. This is not an imaginary doomer future, it’s already here. Products that we are already using are not only allowing, but actively enabling young children to trade real relationships for an illusion — or perhaps more aptly, for a delusion.

So what are the delusions? I see two main categories: (1) the delusion of physical perfection, and (2) the delusion of connection. Let’s start with what we can see: appearance filters and the delusion of physical perfection.