The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It
theverge.com
theverge.com
I remember similar concerns from Millennials about Gen-Z with the Internet and social media. In the end the Internet and Social Media Gen-Z grew up with was quite different from the one Gen-Y was worried about and the reaction of the new generation to it of course not uniform. Similar developments might happen with Gen Alpha and AI, which seems even more polarizing to me.
They tell me I don't have a real job because I just tell the computer what to do, and I don't do the thing myself (to which I can't help but respond that they're absolutely right). If I try to spin them a bullshit story, they tell me how can that be true and maybe I got brainwashed by AI. Also they hate ads with a passion.
If anything, I'm incredibly hopeful for newer generations. They'll probably mostly be fine, like most of us were.
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Edit: many responses, and I'll add that in isolation "x is not real work" coming from a kid is maybe equally endearing as it is divisive.
I'll add that of course my kids are a product of their upbringing, and I make no secret of my existential confusion about what it is to program a computer when most of the time i'm just steering the clanker away from obviously dumb mistakes.
My wife is a psychologist working with underprivileged kids, so we always joke that she has the real job and I'm just doing a hobby that pays well. Much of this is them simply parroting that, maybe. We do try to teach them to think beyond dogma and the cultural bias they grow up in, but who can tell. Everyone is in the end to a great extent a product of their environments, and parents.
Finally. They (their generation) will probably be fine, but they might equally well not be. Vapes, tiktok, souped up ebikes, sexting, designer drugs, climate change, refugees, extremism. So many challenges, but you could argue every generation had that. So i choose not to have too much of an opinion and try to stick with gleeful, desperate optimism.
For most of computing history this has been the case, too!
Like take finance where people just email broken spreadsheets around all day. If they stop doing that then farmers can't get loans to buy crops which means crops don't get planted and so on-so-forth.
Certainly emailing spreadsheets doesn't seem very "real" but there's actual value in providing liquidity it's just not physically demanding.
On the flip side, professional sports is very physically demanding but can you really call what kids do for fun "real work"?
Just to clarify, if said hole had no point, then would it be real work or not? What if the hole was merely a step in a grand plan? As in, if the end result provides a sense of pride, then does the aggregated amount of real vs. fake work that lead to final product have any bearing on the pride of the final product?
They'll see.
In general those "Generation XYZ is threatened by this, thinks that" tropes often annoy me. I'm born somewhere between Gen-Y and Gen-Z and those boundaries feel totally arbitrary.
Once you use AI for all your work you won't be growing anymore, just fading away
"You're not a real ham if you don't use Morse code", "You're not a real machinist if you use CNC", "Your mechanical drawing skills are going to atrophy if you use CAD CAM. "You should manually tape PCB layouts, so you have more control.
And another grandfather's favorite, "Why do you want to use the forklift? You won't always have one, and a pry bar and rollers are good enough, and you learn the value of real work."
A delivery person is still delivering stuff, even if it turns out that using a waymo is cheaper/faster.
I think there are a lot of ICs who may need to re-evaluate what their job actually entails and what they're paid for.
The human mind adapts the best it can for its environment. While not being able to think for oneself is highly detrimental, there may come a time in the distant future where strong abilities to think and reason are less valuable/important. I know it may come off as absolutely ridiculous, but I do not think (no pun intended) that such an uncomfortable idea violates any principles of evolution.
I would argue our ability to think and reason about our environment has been paramount to the survival humanity. Just as hunting abilities were paramount to the ancestors of both my pet dogs.
However, both my dogs would make horrible hunters and would likely starve or die of exposure if left in the woods. But the ability to hunt has been useless to my dogs for their entire lives and for many generations prior.
Both my dogs still have remnants of a prey-drive, and I would argue humans will likely retain some ability to think and reason. But just because an ability is valuable now does not guarantee its future value.
The rise in literacy likely contributed great harm to the ability for one memorize entire epics like ancient Greek poets. However, is there really much value in the ability to memorize an entire Greek epic?
Not to mention, I have met some individuals in my life who would likely cause less harm to themselves and others had an LLM thought on their behalf (I'm kidding, of course).
Evolution isn't a normative thing. It's perfectly possible for us to evolve into something that morally shouldn't exist, especially in an artificial environment.
Hm interesting
So they are making the distinction between regular "human brain" coding and AI-assisted coding?
Regular coding could be described as "not doing the thing yourself, but telling the computer what to do"
(FWIW I do think there is a huge difference; however I am not sure the general public has a very good idea of what "programming" is. I remember having some code up on my screen and my educated family was confused, even at the concept)
Even J.S. Bach was aware of the same concept:
> "There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself."
~ Johann Sebastian Bach
The current state of the world begs to differ with "most of us being mostly fine". Critical thinking skills and the ability to make wise decisions among the various electorates seem to be in a incredibly shitty state.
Anecdotally, Gen Z-ers as a whole are definitely not better at this; they're easily swayed by flashy memes, TikToks and other forms of disinformation. Where younger people used to have a more society minded, leftist lean (before ultimately becoming jaded), they more than ever side with right wing populists from a young age. Not all of them, but a much larger chunk than before.
I still can barely have a convo with it where it doesn't just make up total unworkable bollocks.
It can manage some coding though tbf, but again, not sure how far a completely non-tech user would find it.
Ask them for me, what is a "real" job? If anything, your children, as well as many others, are just exemplifying Effort Justification.
Why is suffering a requirement for something to be meritorious? While I agree that succeeding generations will be mostly fine, I also believe they will perpetuate much of the same regressive thinking as generations before them.
Also, please do not mistake my words. I do not believe LLMs are the be-all and end-all they are hyped up to be nor do I find them to be useless either. In a pragmatic sense, the entire purpose of programming is to provide a solution to a problem. Whatever else the human mind attributes to programming is merely fantasy that the ego ascribes to actions.
I say this all as someone that still mainly writes USDA certified organic code.
If you use AI to understand things for you, you're short-changing yourself.
The article is saying what happens after people do use it, not that they can or do avoid altogether.
That's not to say AI is addictive. It's probably not.
But, if all your classmates are using AI then maybe the workload increases to compensate. Then, you have no choice but to use AI. We see this pattern with companies all the time. They often don't want to advertise aggressively or employ dark patterns. But their competitors do, and then eventually the only way to stay competitive is to join them.
What I know is true is that neither of us has any insight into the interior life of those students. Even you have it secondhand from your daughter. You don’t know if they said that sheepishly, embarrassed at having been in exposed.
If we wanna argue that these tools made it a little bit easier to get away with not doing work then I’m in agreement. But so did PowerPoint. I had a lot of group presentations where it was somebody’s job to do the PowerPoint slides—often one of the easier jobs.
I guess I don’t know man. I’ve taught in college before the AI takeover and had lots of people that were bad at doing group projects. It’s pretty easy to get high and not do the work in college. With or without robots.
> 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.
° https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59801798-blood-in-the-ma...
From a power-centric point of view, if my neighbors intentionally cast off modern technology, they are ripe for domination, economic exploitation, etc. The history of human civilization from the age of city-states onward is about navigating the need for protection from hostile, arrogating outside forces (and/or being one of those hostile forces).
Or meaning that if AI dies I'll be one of the ones who knows how to do things? That's not so stupid.
Be like Zohran Mamdani. Zohran only had to win an election where everyone hated the incumbent, which is one of the easiest ways to get power. His enemies are floundering now, they're trying to pin baseball losses on him because they've got nothing else. Most of us here, being nerdy technologists and not charismatic politicians, will have to do it by creating technology and learning the tricks of back-end sales, the way ZUckerberg or Page did.
Dictators win elections and then replace them with hereditary lines of succession. We don't have a word for kings who hold elections for their successors. Usually they only do so at knifepoint. Game theory - inter-agent power dynamics - is one of the strongest forces in the universe, almost as strong as entropy. Game theory is Cthulu, Moloch, SCP-3125, that thing from Homestuck that eats universes, and both God and Satan. But if we give up, we lose.
If the "societal we" don't care to drown in AI-driven slop, the capitalist argument would seem to be a rebirth of local theater, written by no-kidding playwrights and performed by local actors in neighborhood venues.
The "societal we" will have the humanity and art that it demands in the marketplace as consumers, pure and simple.
That won't be the case when AI can do almost every white collar jobs.
This submission mentions certain incidents arguably representative of (b) but is squarely focused on (a). It discusses polling young people on what they think of "AI"
The greatest "threat" to "AI" IMHO is (a), where this results in stagnant or decreased usage of "AI"
"AI" is relentlessly hyped because the usage numbers are paramount
IMHO (b) is not a serious threat to usage
For some reason, commenters invested in "AI" seek to characterise (a) as (b)
I'm not sure why
To me, it seems inappropriate to compare (a) a group of people today, i.e., Gen Z, who use some "machinery" but dislike it, according to polling, with (b) a group of people in the 17th century that refused to use some machinery, sabotaged it and violently attacked their employers, some of who threatened they would violently attack their employees
1. Many jobs will be eliminated (will they be offset by new jobs?)
2. The new technology will need to be adopted if you don’t want to fall behind (will there be less of these jobs or more?)
In past circumstances like the one you mentioned, there were more jobs than before. Ultimately we all just want to consume endlessly. That pressure creates more demand when prices lower, which causes businesses to compete via differentiation, which creates more jobs. I don’t think this situation will be any different
Were the jobs better or worse though?
There are truly mentally unwell people in charge who would like get out the E-meter and audit everyone who does not follow their new Scientology knockoff. Yes, the advertising methods and suppression of opposition are the same.
The actual progressive thing to do is to accept that it is, and think of how to build the world in a way that protects people.
But AI is actually not very good at replacing an entire lower-level worker’s job as a whole. It works well only when that work is broken down into smaller and smaller tasks.
The core problem is this: the coercive force of AI use is felt by the lower classes, while the upper classes still have the freedom not to use it. AI may be able to make decisions based on more data than executives do, and perhaps even make better decisions than management. Yet the people being replaced are the lower-level workers.
This is the problem. The upper classes, who claim that AI is an essential tool, still have the freedom not to use it. But the lower classes cannot survive unless they use it. It becomes a tool required for survival, while at the same time being treated as something wrong, inferior, or low-status if you use it.
To get a job, AI becomes an essential survival tool. But culturally, it is also treated as a tool that damages creativity. I see this in open-source communities as well, in the class discourse around open source.
The same culture appears on Hacker News. Among the upper layer of open-source communities, there is often hostility toward AI-generated code, based on ideas of human purity: AI code is said to have no meaning, no responsibility, no real authorship. So even within open source, this takes on a class character.
But as a freelance developer, I have to trade against my own code-writing ability in order to survive and deliver. Because of AI, the floor price of software delivery has collapsed. If I do not use AI, I cannot meet the new requirements.
In the past, a job that would have given me two months and paid $5,000 is now expected to be completed in two weeks for the same $5,000. Without AI, that volume of work is impossible to handle.
This kind of discourse always makes me uncomfortable. I dislike it, but I have to use it.
AI lowers the barrier to creation and learning, but the way it lowers that barrier can also bypass the training of thought itself. It turns young people into both beneficiaries and damaged subjects at the same time.
And we live under this loop of coercion. Sometimes I think I do not want to use AI.
But if I want to survive, I have to use it. I feel the abilities I once took pride in beginning to decay, and I feel myself becoming increasingly bound to AI companies. At the same time, I also feel another kind of ability beginning to emerge.
Perhaps growing older means learning how to live inside irony.
This is why the harshest critics of AI tend to be white collar workers of this social class. The same kinds that told coal miners and autoworkers to "learn to code" and called them deplorables for voting nativist in 2016.
Any chance to build mutual trust was squandered. The jobs worst impacted by AI are jobs where most of the workers are Democrats and live in blue states that don't swing.
Meanwhile, those manufacturing, construction, and healthcare jobs that are becoming a bigger part of the economy tend to be in the purple part of the country so their needs are heard.
i don't see a relationship betwern criticism and the chance of automation/replacement
the harshest critics that i see tend to be, almost ubiquitously, creatives
perhaps just my walk of life
“Wow, this is very, very good at my job, which must be a difficult job because it pays well and I'm a smart guy. Imagine how well it will work for the dum-dums.”
AI just repeats whatever the prevailing opinion is at that time. I am a very heavy AI user (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT) and have queried it on a variety of topics. AI is not thinking, it is repeating.
That would be an improvement. They are generally far too sychophantic to just repeat the prevailing opinion, and instead synthesise the opinion that they think wants to be heard by the user.
But that is not what most “work” usually means. Work is mostly repetitive. The actual moment of decision is brief.
So what do I mean by work here? I mean the collection, organization, and synthesis of the materials needed before reaching that decision.
For that part of the process, AI is extremely effective.
Otherwise they would
1. force humans to spend much more time on these decisions, and
2. Teach humans that the only way to save time on decision-making is to collaborate with other humans
I had a reply to your Asian take https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47970518
This^. We aren’t talking about general intelligence. We are mostly using a large language model. It’s a model of languages and not the universe. Language encodes a lot, enough to be “unreasonably effective”.
I'm progressive, but this is just not helpful. Progressives should focus less on trying to argue that AI sucks actually (it obviously doesn't), we should focus on thinking about how to transform society to still protect human quality of life and dignity even when strong AI exists.
So you have quadrupled your income? That seems like the opposite of a collapse.
In my case, unlike contract freelancers who are hired for a fixed period, I usually work on a project-delivery basis. Of course, well-known programmers may be able to negotiate salary-like contracts, but that is not my situation.
I think my earlier example may have been unclear. What I meant was not that the price increased. I meant that a project that used to take two months for $5,000 is now expected to be delivered in two weeks for the same $5,000.
That point probably needed more explanation. In the current freelance market, prices have collapsed more than many people realize.
My English is not perfect, since I am not from the English-speaking world, so I may have caused some confusion. Please understand my point as: work that used to reasonably take two months is now expected to be completed within two weeks.
It’s really not though. A lot of sort of incidental communication that people don’t really read carefully it’s fine at. But the actual hard stuff it’s just not that great. It’s basically average by design so it almost definitionally incapable of being great.
I’ve been trying to use AI for putting together job applications, tailor my resume and cover letter and stuff. But it’s just not good. It’s decent if I want a sanity-check analysis as in “how does this come across generically.” But if I ask it to write anything it sound like LinkedIn slop. I expect if everyone starts using this to write their basic communication you’ll be in a world where nobody is reading anything anyone says because it’s so BORING. Everyone sounds the same, everything is phrased in this sort of mushy and generic way. At that point the intended communication isn’t happening! We will have sanded away all the rough edges to the point where you can’t actually get a grip on anything anymore.
At another point I tried to test it out and asked it to wireframe a very basic application for me. Something that should have been a very lightweight thing that runs on device to do a basic background process it architected as some crazy overcomplicated enterprise-scaled thing as if I’m trying to build a unicorn startup out of this rather than just a toy app to organize my shopping list. If I wasn’t technically savvy enough to recognize it was way overcomplicating things I’d have just run with this. And what’s worse is, it burns through all your token budget to figure out a bunch of problems you don’t need to have!
Obviously I’m using it and find it useful, but I’ve started to develop serious doubts about how useful it will ever be without an informed and accountable attendant overseeing it.
Us pogressives should stop trying to argue that AI actually sucks, it obviously doesn't and will continue to improve.
We would start organizing and thinking about ways to build a society where the average human can still have a solid, interesting quality of life even when solid AI is everywhere.
From the software engineer's standpoint, I do a fair amount of vibe coding for personal projects. If the result meets my narrow goal, I am happy. At work I can't let a single line of generated code be left unread and unverified because that's where it matters.
However, is this exclusive to young people? I'm a millenial (early 90s) and I share their sentiment. I might not share it for the same reason though. Personally, I'm concerned about what AI usage would do to my cognitive ability, and as such I try to limit my use. I can't avoid using it at work (we're being tracked on "AI Adoption") and it does genuinely speed up some of my tasks. And I do play around with AI coding tools, mostly because I think I _should_ know them in this day and age.
But apart from that, I'm not using it. I'm using DDG searches rather than asking ChatGPT for solutions, I still go around reading websites and papers instead of AI summaries, and I don't outsource my writing to it. (i.e, I write my own emails, my own blogs, my own poorly worded HN comments, etc).
paste the verge article text into your favorite AI tool and ask for an analysis.
Make sure to ask it to read the source Gallup data that this article leans on and compare the conclusions drawn.
I suspect that as you rely more on a robot for this your own skills will atrophy.
Putting an llm in front of it helps me focus on the facts.
There are also too many things to read. My default before llms would have been to ignore this article.
At least now I learned some things (mostly about the Gallup poll which had source data)
I do think some people will outsource critical thinking to llms - but it also helps amplify critical thinking by doing a lot of the filtering and organizing and let me focus on the things i think are important.
> Putting an llm in front of it helps me focus on the facts.
This argument reminds me of one of Ted Chiang's short stories about "lookism," which (iirc) was a natural preference for people to prefer people who are attractive. In the story, a new technology was developed that could interact with a person's brain to "turn off" their lookism and instead just consider what a person brings to the table without your brain factoring in your own attraction to them.
I won't spoil the story, but a little arms race develops in the technology to "turn off" natural human reactions to things like attraction, emotion in speech, etc., so that users won't be swayed by them in advertising, political campaigns, anything that could possibly have an agenda. By the end, people using the technology are described as highly autistic – unable to perceive any human emotional context, triggers or attraction – so that they're able to interpret just a person's intent and not be manipulated by the underlying motivations.
It's an interesting story, your use of LLMs to cut out the "emotional triggers" from an article and get just the "objective facts" reminds me of that.
This used to be a very important skill taught in high school and perfected in university. We have lost something if people cannot focus even for short reads.
> 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.
Perhaps you should take a cue from these surveyees and do your own thinking.
> The article accurately cites real Gallup data but selectively omits findings that complicate its "backlash" narrative — most notably that curiosity is Gen Z's single most common emotion toward AI, and that daily users remain substantially more hopeful and excited than the aggregate figures suggest. The 79% "laziness" concern and declining hope figures are presented as evidence of generational rejection, when the researchers themselves describe what they found as "deep ambivalence." *In short, the article uses real numbers to tell a cleaner, more oppositional story than the underlying polling actually supports.*
Then I then put that Claude critique back into Claude and asked it to analyze the critique for bias and agendas and got this:
> The critique accurately catches real flaws in The Verge article — particularly the omission of "curiosity" as Gen Z's top emotion and the failure to distinguish between heavy users (who are more positive) and non-users (who drive most of the negativity). However, *the critique has its own directional bias, consistently framing every correction in ways that soften the negative trend, while ignoring data that cuts the other way — like the sharp positivity decline even among daily users, and the near-majority of Gen Z workers who see AI as a net negative in the workplace. *Both pieces are selectively using the same real data to tell opposite stories; the Gallup findings themselves are more nuanced and more negative than the critique allows.*
So according to Claude, Claude is biased in how it describes The Verge as biased.
LLMs are breakthrough technologies. The AI products we have today are SaaS products built by companies doing everything they can to find people who will pay for them. Very, very different things.
THIS. ALL. DAY.
Curiosity is a "desire to know." We badly want to know about things that threaten us. People in 2020 were extremely curious about COVID-19, but that doesn't mean they liked it.
You might say, "well it's open for interpretation. It could be positive curiosity." But why stop there? Interpret: Anxiety is more common than anger, and anger is more common than excitement. Given a sample member who is anxious, angry, not excited, and not hopeful, do you think their curiosity is positively or negatively inflected?
Additionally, I don't know where Claude got the idea that "daily users remain substantially more hopeful and excited than the aggregate figures suggest." That's not in the data set, and a different data set will need to be interpreted separately.
I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but you've completely failed to engage critically with either the article or with Claude. Claude misread the article and then affirmed its own misreading, and you took that all at face value.
This is only true if you assume that an AI tool is itself unbiased. I'm not sure how anyone can earnestly believe AI tools are unbiased after Grok's MechaHitler episode [0], unless they just aren't giving it much critical thought.
0 - https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...
We're also no strangers to enshittification, we have first hand experience of technology causing negative societal effects when in the hands of for-profit entities.
Or a belief of those scared that an imploding "AI" bubble will ruin their financial futures. Or just that most of the humans in their own white collar professions will be replaced by AI's.
I don't see how these and other sentiments are unique to Gen Z at all.
The difference I've seen is that many zoomers have given up on learning in the first place. "What's the point?"
AI can be used for good especially when you're digging into the details / nitty gritty and asking good questions.
Anything can be used in a saccharine way to take the easy way out. Why not ban Cliff Notes as well? Sure, it won't write the essay, but also you didn't read the book.
You don't have to use these tools in a lazy way. You don't have to use these tools in a way that cheats / compromises your intelligence. Building up the awareness to use them in a way that multiplies instead of subtracts is going to be the key issue for my kids, and for anybody in the workforce today.
Could be me too, but seeing China's general societal infatuation with AI outpace the US by orders of magnitude, I think that's a bit less likely.
Some people are genuinely interested and excited about this new technology. Other people have an interest that the AI will succeed. At least on the surface it seems that these two groups are louder (or more successful) than the ones that oppose AI.
> We can make this technology illegal, and shut it down completely. Why don’t we?
Because there are not many (if any) lobby groups that pour money into making it illegal and also because of fear of not being left behind. There are also plenty of lobby groups that invest a lot of money into putting AI into everything.
you'd need everybody to be onboard, be it your neighbor, the guy 8000 miles away from you on the other side of the planet, all the nations
if even one goes "well ill just keep going" it won't work.
it's like with nuclear weapons, nobody wants to be the one without them unless nobody else has them, so in the end they're still prevalent.
no government on earth will make ai outright illegal. they are the perfect thing to shrug accountability onto, let alone all of the actual semi-useful reasons of keeping ai legal.
how would you even make it illegal? people have local models everywhere. if your country makes it illegal but mine doesnt, people from your country will just vpn and access them in my country. it would have to be a worldwide effort (lol).
a central tenet of justice is that the punishment fits the crime. for CSAM, it is obvious why extremely long prison sentences are fitting. the damage CSAM causes is immense and hard to even capture with words.
the damage llms cause is... not even close.
And then you'd still have to defend against AI powered scams (cloned voices, cloned video, bespoke scam campaigns directly targeted at individuals generated by AI with OSINT), social media bot campaigns, AI generated black mail or harassment including deepfakes, etc because that stuff is already largely illegal and either ignored or not feasible to police as it happens across international borders.
Us, the older folks, are not allowed to complain, lest we get branded as old fashioned, unable to adapt, etc.
On the plus side, I believe AI will finally kill social media, which can only be a good thing.
2 comments that smack of AI authorship, or if the above is human-created, god I wish they'd used AI.
Right now corporations are building the infrastructure out wildly and incorporating it into everything. They’re concerned about a race to the top while creating absolute inefficiency and ignoring responsible, sustainable growth.
The task of GenZ should not be to avoid AI, in my opinion.
Rather, embrace it. Own it.
WEAPONIZE IT.
When Google mainstreamed the Search Engine and added tool after tool, it made things that were previously legacy (Word Processing? Pay a big licensing fee to Microsoft, only save to your local machine or hard media! Along comes Google Drive and Docs and now you can edit your document everywhere and a computer crash doesn’t take it out!) well, digitized.
AI is that integration at warp speed.
We now have the tools to work harder and faster. We have near-instant access to research. If we are discerning, AI is actually not a weapon against us. It is a tool we can use to change the narrative.
Big companies are actually banking on fear of the masses. They want you to believe that AI is too big. That it is all-knowing. They don’t want you to recognize you can download ollama and a localized agent and tune it to your needs. Or to get into Gemini and ask it how you can disconnect from Google’s cloud if that’s really what you want it to do.
AI is the future. But it needs human hands. The question. You need to ask is: your hands? Or Microsoft’s?
Local models are quite efficient as well.
The moment you start doing this at any scale, the companies will notice, and after a few winks, nods, and campaign donations, you will not be able to use it anymore.