GoKawiilIt’s been almost three years since Silicon Valley started aggressively pushing large language model-based chatbots like ChatGPT as the supposedly inevitable future of everything, and there’s no group that has felt the pressure quite like Gen Z.
Like with many tech trends before it, it’s no surprise that young people are among the biggest adopters of AI chatbot tools. But contrary to the tales spun by tech companies like OpenAI and Google, polling data shows that Gen Z students and workers are a big part of the wider cultural backlash against AI. And even as they utilize these tools, vast swaths of young people are deeply acrimonious and even resentful of the AI-centric future that many feel is being forced on them.
“The part that feels scariest to me is the human impact … their ability to have relationships or just basic communication.”
Far from the stereotype of lazy young people looking for shortcuts, Gen Zers have had some of the loudest and most detailed objections to generative AI use. Their attitudes also reflect a much wider backlash against AI and the tech industry in general, which has recently resulted in a nonpartisan movement against data centers across the country and threatened both CEOs and politicians supportive of Silicon Valley’s AI frenzy.
Meg Aubuchon, a 27-year-old art teacher living in Los Angeles, says their response and that of many of their peers has been to avoid chatbot tools entirely. “It just makes me want to dig my heels into a career where I never have to use AI, even if that’s a career that isn’t going to pay as well,” Aubuchon told The Verge.
Emerging from academia and into the vice grip of an increasingly brutal job market, young people face an impossible contradiction. They are being told, on the one hand, that these tools are going to eliminate millions of jobs, and on the other that they have to use them if they don’t want to fall behind. They’re the first new generation of adults to navigate a world flooded with chatbots and generative AI slop, after having already lost years of their youth to the covid-19 pandemic. And all the while, Silicon Valley’s multitrillion-dollar push for AI adoption is clashing with their fears of its well-documented impacts — on the environment, disinformation, academic integrity, and our social fabric and emotional well-being, to name just a few.
“The part that feels scariest to me is the human impact, because it impacts people on an individual level and how they relate to other people, whether that be their ability to have relationships or just basic communication,” said Aubuchon.
Sharon Freystaetter, 25, went to school for computer science at a young age and spent three years working as a cloud infrastructure engineer at a major Silicon Valley company. But right as AI hype really started to take off, she left the company, citing ethical concerns and anxiety over the environmental impacts of data centers. Now, she has left the tech industry for good, and says she avoids chatbots and disables AI features in applications whenever possible.
“I think everyone in my immediate peer group is not using AI and is actively against it, besides my friends who are in computer science and are essentially mandated to use it,” Freystaetter, who is now a food service worker in New York, told The Verge. “When I came back and started to look around [for tech jobs], suddenly everything was saying ‘You need to use AI to get this job’ in the requirements.”
Fears that chatbots are wrecking critical thinking and social skills are common among many groups of young adults, even as a wide majority of them admit to using chatbot tools regularly. According to a recent Harvard-Gallup study, 74 percent of young adults surveyed in the United States said they use a chatbot at least once a month (another study found more than half of US college students admit to using the tools for their coursework on a weekly basis). At the same time, 79 percent of those surveyed by Gallup “expressed concern that AI makes people lazier,” and 65 percent said that using chatbots “promotes instant gratification, not real understanding” and prevents people from engaging with ideas in a critical or meaningful way.
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