this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2026

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381

Gen Z’s use of AI is plateauing as youth feel less hopeful about the tech (gizmodo.com)

submitted 1 week ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world

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Young people have grown increasingly skeptical of artificial intelligence, even those who use it daily, according to a new Gallup poll of more than 1,500 people aged 14 to 29.

There is no decline in AI use among Gen Zers, but there is also no increase since the same poll was conducted in 2025. The latest poll found that AI use was plateauing among young users, accompanied by rising concern about the technology’s consequences.

The findings are significant because Gen Z is “the generation most likely to enter or grow within the workforce over the next decade,” the report notes, meaning that their adoption could determine the trajectory of broader societal AI adoption. Gen Z has already overtaken Boomers in the workforce. Right now, the AI world is preparing for a massive jump in expected demand, and the top tech and financial companies are investing billions upon billions of dollars into building out the supply. Experts have warned that if demand does not pan out exactly as expected in the short term, then it could have disastrous consequences for the economy.

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 18 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Enshitification barely allowed these tools to function as advertised for more than a few years.

They're already getting siloed behind paywalls, tranched into "unusable trash $TooMuch/mo" and "barely working as intended $WayTooMuch/year", and porked up with useless ephemeral. The cutting edge stuff - Sora, for instance - gets trashed almost as soon as it is released. The OpenClaw shit just fucks your shit up if you're not babysitting it constantly. Mythos isn't even for public consumption. Grok is entirely for CSAM. A bunch of these models are just being turned over to the military, because Pentagon officials know to keep eating that bullshit and never complain.

What's the draw anymore? Come use this garbage application that is going to render your job obsolete largely by tanking the overall economy.

[–] partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 5 points 6 days ago

That is why I am make sure to download and backup interesting models from huggingface. I can even run some of them on my hardware.

I fully expect that some innovation will one day make models much easier to run locally, including the huge ones. Like quantization already does, but better. By around this time, I also expect a fresh push from OpenAI and the like to try making access to open models much more difficult. So, I want a repository in preparation. Fuck them in advance.

[–] flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 5 points 6 days ago

And don't forget that those payment tiers are heavily subsidized.

[–] scaredoftrumpwinning@lemmy.world 13 points 6 days ago

After my Google maps was updated to use Gemini things got so much worse. I was trying to send a message to my daughter to send a message to the group chat. Every time I said group chat in my dictation it would search for the group chat never finding it and making me start over. I finally gave up and told her to call me.

OTOH Alexa is better at farting so we have that.

[–] AHamSandwich@lemmy.world 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

My gen Z kid was pretty excited because it seemed like AI had so much promise. Promise to do his homework for him. He since learned how he spends more time getting the right answers out of it than just doing the work himself.

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago

My kid never really thought it was useful from the onset for fact based material and/or understood that the point of the work was to actually learn something and that the output doesn't matter and is utterly meaningless if AI generates it.

I have used it to accelerate double checking their math homework. If it agrees, I assume the homework was done right. If it disagrees, then I do the math manually myself and of the disagreements, about 70% is the AI getting something wrong.

My kid did however for a time use it for entertainment, but decided pretty quickly that the chatbots added nothing to the experience my kid did not bring to the experience, so stopped that as well.

Very firmly anti-AI slop too.

Caused some friction when my wife got into a GenAI story for a few days but my wife got bored of the concept too.

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 17 points 6 days ago

Gen Z is “the generation most likely to enter or grow within the workforce over the next decade,” the report notes"

...I like to think "most likely" implies there's a small chance the entire generation will somehow figure it out and just collectively bypass "tHe WoRkFoRcE" altogether. Lol

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago

I'm realizing it's not GenAI itself that I necessarily am bothered by, it's that it just makes everyone that already annoyed me even worse.

People that flood the internet with low-value clickbait? Well now they can flood even more, even more text, lots of video.

People that see a popular content creator that puts out good stuff and then tries to do a knock off? Now I might see that knock-off for 15 seconds before I realize that the thing is trash.

People that like to tell everyone else how to do their jobs that they themselves have no experience about? Well here's GenAI to make them claim they can do someone's job better.

Megalomaniac billionaires with messiah complexes? Well, GenAI makes them think they are gods. Elon's Grok even just casually drops Elon praise into content for no reason.

Executives that view themselves as "thought leaders" and are dismissive of their employees? Yeah, they are itching to lay off some people.

[–] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 days ago

Let me know when I can get a femboi mark Zuckerberg AI uploaded to my sexbot 4200. Till then, this tech is dead to me.

[–] scytale@piefed.zip 53 points 1 week ago (5 children)

It doesn’t matter because the companies are mandating their workforce to use it regardless if you like it or not. For personal use, yes interest may be waning, but wanting to use AI is not a factor when you are being forced to use it at work.

[–] plateee@piefed.social 33 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Enterprise is really the only option companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have left. They're drastically underpricing the service for what it costs to provide and users have shown that price hikes don't fare well.

But enterprises? Well you just made AI a core part of your software development workflow, what are you supposed to do, start manually reviewing bitbucket merge requests? Rewrite your Jenkins pipelines? No, when the price hikes come, businesses will pay, and then downsize to reduce that opex.

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[–] o_oli@lemmy.world 48 points 1 week ago (22 children)

Once you use AI enough you start to peer behind the curtain and see how it's all just a magic trick and not actually magic like it seems to begin with. So yeah I think its unsurprising people would come to this conclusion.

[–] partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 9 points 6 days ago

Read up on Information Theory. These machines are glorified autocomplete engines, built by exploiting redundancy within language. Like… you give it a billion sentences, and you ask it “what comes after ‘the dog’?” It says something random like “limousine.” You penalize it for the wrong answer, which means it updates its weights to ever so slightly point further away from such nonsense. You then do this hundreds of millions of times, and suddenly the weights start to be pretty well tuned. Input “the dog” might output “sat” now. Good job.

I mean… there’s definitely more fancy stuff going on. But this seems to be something fundamental about it all. Given as much, I can’t help but feel like… yeah… they do suck at what they’re most often used for, and it’s not surprising why.

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

I'm surprised it takes so long, honestly. I keep seeing a progression of people who think they uniquely figured out how to avoid the pitfalls of GenAI mistakes and then getting hit with the same mistakes everyone gets hit with and having shocked Pikachu face when the LLM does something it "promised" not to do. They will not believe anyone telling them that LLM generating the phrase "I commit to avoiding deleting any data" doesn't mean it actually committed to anything. Even when that fails, they think the LLM saying "I have made a mistake, and I have learned from it and I won't allow it to happen again" means something, and shocked again as, surprise, that also doesn't mean anything.

Of course, just last week someone was asking me if I had tried some GenAI stuff and they had been thinking about trying it. Shockingly some people have managed to avoid it and I guess they have more folks to burn through...

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[–] KelvarCherry@piefed.blahaj.zone 40 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (11 children)

I am once again asking you to petition your local school boards to block generative AI usage by students and teachers alike. AI is being pushed on these kids at a young age, and I feel with the downward-trending attention span of Gen Alpha and Gen Z, that will form into a lifelong dependency. Plus, the loss of the licenses from the school system will be a significant dent in the AI metrics.

Here are some demands: block ChatGPT/Gemini/Copilot/DeepSeek on school networks (like porn and gaming sites are blocked); prohibit use of AI-generated images and text on assignments and teaching materials; ensure no assignments will require or recommend the use of AI output at any point.

These suggestions are based on reports I've heard from students. Please feel free to comment your own recommendations or information.

[–] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Why do you feel this technology is safe for adults to use if you think its harmful to students?

[–] Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Where did they say they think it’s safe for adults?

[–] KelvarCherry@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 5 days ago

I absolutely do not. I'm focused on one in-road to AI usage. My mind has been gravitating toward schools as they are run according to local government boards that people can reasonably challenge and get a seat on, and to whom the representatives are much more accountable and much easier to persuade.

It's a lot more difficult to stop, say, a corporate middle manager from pushing AI on their employees. Though, to that point, employees can leave jobs, where students have much less agency over what the school curriculum is, and could be coerced into AI dependency by that school authority (which I have heard happening). Child and young adult brains are also far more malleable, and I fear AI dependency would have a worse, perhaps irreversible, effect.

Thank you for prompting me to clarify ^^

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[–] nosuchanon@lemmy.world 36 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Just fucking pop this stupid bubble already. I want to be able to buy cheap ram and hardware again.

[–] TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 13 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

it will be another year or two.

they are still actively investing in this. once the money starts drying up then the bubble will pop.

and all the tech companies will ask the government for a trillion dollars to cover their asses, and we will give it to them, because America.

[–] hitmyspot@aussie.zone 3 points 6 days ago

It doesnt need to dry up. They could totally pop it by continuing to increase their costs exponentially while investment remains high. Or just users get bored and move on.

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