Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a new kind of other in the psychic lives of adolescents. From emotionally responsive chatbots to AI-enhanced learning tools, these systems simulate relational presence while lacking subjectivity, desire, and embodied affect. Drawing on Winnicott and Bion (for containment, transitional space, and symbolization) with a limited Lacanian lens (for lack and the Symbolic), this paper theorizes AI as a “digital other” and examines how its structural features—predictive language, constant availability, and scripted responsiveness—can mimic containment and recognition while bypassing absence, delay, and misattunement that are crucial for psychic growth. The author articulates bounded opportunities (e.g., human-held scaffolding for affect labeling, rehearsal, and access for neurodivergent youth) alongside developmental risks (defensive substitution, “flawless mirroring,” premature narrative coherence). A developmental ethics is proposed that preserves symbolic space—silence, ambiguity, frustration—and supports adolescents’ navigation of otherness, bodily change, desire, and authorship in an age of algorithmic immediacy. Practice recommendations for clinicians, caregivers, and designers situate AI as a medium for expression rather than a substitute for the desiring other.
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