Dr. Nikhila Natarajan / Ishani Duttagupta

Dr. Nikhila Natarajan rejects the reductive “addiction” labels often used by adults to describe media use by young people. She is a youth and media researcher who teaches at Rutgers and Fairleigh Dickinson universities, and her research focuses on the intersection of AI and youth development, specifically highlighting teenage agency. Her work provides a vital framework for understanding media use as a distinct and meaningful developmental phase.

“My research prioritizes youth voices and tells the story of teen media use and teen experiences through the voices of young people. I tell their stories of media use through the lens of how they develop, how they think, and how they recalibrate their media use — which is a missing link in prior work,” Natarajan said in an interview. She has coined the term “Ambient AI” to describe a media environment that can be leveraged for new knowledge about youth cognitive development. “In 2023, I conceptualized the term ‘Ambient AI’ to refer to the ubiquity and pervasiveness of machine prediction in everyday media use. This is a novel contribution to the field of youth and media studies and offers a new vocabulary through which to think about how AI threads itself into everyday media experiences, and why it can be particularly challenging for the developing adolescent,” she said.

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Recently, her novel framework and recommendations have been highlighted by the New Jersey government in a special report on media policies in K-12 schools in the state. Dr. Natarajan has contributed new vocabularies for studying youth media use, with important implications for media researchers, policymakers, youth and their families. “I study the role of AI in the everyday lives of youth. My research offers a completely new way of thinking about the confluence of teens, technology and policy, and has been highlighted by New Jersey in its report titled ‘Growing Up Online,’” she said.

Natarajan emphasizes that youth voices are essential when establishing guardrails for emerging technologies like AI. She notes that new tech often creates an asymmetry of power, where the dominant narrative is shaped primarily by adults and developers. “A societal debate where everybody talks about the red lines for these technologies is vital,” she explained.

The students Natarajan teaches in Rutgers classrooms are negotiating the real-time effects of generative AI, raising compelling questions about its limits. “In their words, I see the contours of a future where they not only shape tech guardrails but also craft entirely new niches of work,” she said. In her experience, while AI-powered media environments shape the youth experience, youth agency actively reshapes those environments in return. “However, this agency emerges from a challenging developmental stage; it is no small feat for a teenager to navigate platforms specifically designed to prioritize engagement and instant rewards.”

Earlier this year, Natarajan was invited by the Indian government to speak at the India AI Summit, where she spoke on evidence-based findings from four years of research focused on youth and AI. One of the important takeaways for her was India’s approach to AI, which she thinks is unique. “Our country’s AI mission is trying to solve extremely well-defined local problems, prioritizing voice-based models and local languages so that millions of people who are unable to use text can use voice to prompt vernacular models for pressing problems in the realms of, say, agriculture, medicine and K-12 education,” she said. She also felt that India’s homegrown AI models showcase the nation’s depth of technical expertise and commitment to solving for Bharat, which builds on the learnings from the ambitious India Stack infrastructure. “Foundational AI models from BharatGen are fluent in understanding and speaking 22+ Indian languages and dialects.”

No surprise that the new world of work in the age of AI, especially for young people, is a topic she covers in depth. She acknowledges that the job market is daunting, with undergraduates in colleges feeling the pressure, adding that her work with teens and their parents suggests a more complex storyboard. “The big debates about the future of jobs tend to be talked about through the lens of how technology is acting on society. But the future of jobs is a competitive landscape, with a lot of forces at play, including youth culture, families, technologists who are building new products, governments and public opinion. Youth, because of where they are in their cognitive development, are going to be thinking about the zeitgeist in new ways, and they are going to chart exciting, new paths,” she said.

Her own career path has been anything but conventional. Raised in Hyderabad, she transitioned from studying economics to journalism, beginning her professional life as a sports reporter. After moving to the U.S., she famously covered the 2016 election using a “studio-in-a-suitcase” setup. “Through it all, I was tracking how technology diffusion intersected with audience behavior in digital media. I wanted to go deeper,” she recalled. That drive led her to Rutgers in 2021, where she pivoted to a Ph.D. program researching youth and AI.

She believes the growing adoption of AI has created a “sweet spot” for interdisciplinary study, shifting the spotlight beyond traditional STEM fields. “There was a time when computer engineering was the primary celebrated skill,” she said. “But those are highly structured fields. We are now entering a golden moment for the social sciences — and for people who truly understand people.”

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