Marcus Carter | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Restoration, Exploration and Transformation: How Youth Engage Character.AI Chatbots for Feels, Fun and Finding themselves

Young people are among the fastest adopters of generative AI, yet research emphasises adult-designed tools and experiments rather than playful, self-directed youth use. We analysed discourse from 4,172 users in Character.AI's official Discord, finding that the most engaged users were predominantly adolescents (50% aged 13-17), female or non-binary (61.9%), with most (59%) creating their own characters. We contribute (1) a descriptive account of how highly-engaged youth on Character.AI's Discord use AI for playful, emotional, and creative practices that push the platform limits; (2) a framework of three engagement intents -- Restoration (emotional regulation), Exploration (creative experimentation), and Transformation (identity development); and (3) a taxonomy of seven youth-created character archetypes. Together, these findings reveal how youth invent novel roles for AI, expose critical misalignments between youth use and current AI experiences, and provide frameworks for researchers and practitioners to design youth-centred AI futures.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Bubbles enable volumetric negative compressibility in metastable elastocapillary systems

Although coveted in applications, few materials expand when subject to compression or contract under decompression, i.e., exhibit the negative compressibility phenomenon. A key step to achieve such counterintuitive behaviour is the destabilisations of (meta)stable equilibria of the constituents. Here, we propose a simple strategy to obtain negative compressibility exploiting capillary forces both to precompress the elastic material and to release such precompression by a threshold phenomenon -- the reversible formation of a bubble in a lyophobic flexible cavity. We demonstrate that the solid part of such metastable elastocapillary systems displays negative compressibility across different scales: hydrophobic microporous materials, proteins, and millimetre-sized laminae. This concept is applicable to fields such as porous materials, biomolecules, sensors and may be easily extended to create unexpected material susceptibilities.

cond-mat.soft↗