this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2026

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371

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

submitted 2 days 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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[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours 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.

[–] AHamSandwich@lemmy.world 10 points 11 hours 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 2 points 3 hours 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.

[–] scaredoftrumpwinning@lemmy.world 10 points 15 hours 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.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 15 points 18 hours ago (1 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 16 hours 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.

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 16 points 1 day 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

[–] KelvarCherry@piefed.blahaj.zone 37 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 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.

[–] Stiggyman@ani.social 12 points 1 day ago (4 children)

As a system admin. We already do this during exams and these fucking kids still figure out how to bypass shit

We had one the other day use Google chrome remote desktop (had no idea that was a thing) to remote hone bypassing the exam network block

Only reason we caught them early rather than doing grading was because the idiot uploaded their final answers from their home PC

[–] alsimoneau@lemmy.ca 3 points 13 hours ago

Why aren't they doing the exams with a pen and paper?

[–] KelvarCherry@piefed.blahaj.zone 8 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Perhaps they will. You will always have bad actors. My suggestions are really more focused on the messaging those kids get from schools.

I have heard that many students have gotten assignments on which one of the requirements is to use Text/Image generation, or for which they are a suggested tool. Stopping students from being encouraged to use AI is far more important (and far easier) than stopping every kid from cheating on assignments with it.

[–] Stiggyman@ani.social 1 points 18 hours ago

Yes I agree.

However sadly I am not the one teaching. I just run the magic curtain of user management and internal servers

[–] ATPA9@feddit.org 1 points 18 hours ago

Well, at least they are creative

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

why do they need internet access during the exam?

[–] Stiggyman@ani.social 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Trust me I am also confused by this but it mostly boils down to "you can't expect these kids to not be idiots who show up logged out of office or whatever"

[–] dansemacabreingalone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 day ago

logged out of office

That sentence suggests so many layers of dysfunction.

[–] Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Have you considered they dont need any of this technology to learn? That it might actually introduce confusion and distraction which will reduce attention and focus?

Oral lectures are going to become the standard again by a few years time, I bet.

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[–] nosuchanon@lemmy.world 34 points 1 day 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 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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 2 points 11 hours 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.

[–] o_oli@lemmy.world 45 points 1 day 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.

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours 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...

[–] partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 6 points 14 hours 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.

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[–] scytale@piefed.zip 49 points 2 days ago (2 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 31 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days 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.

[–] RagingRobot@lemmy.world 13 points 2 days ago

I'm thinking that eventually the corporations will all be AI all the way through and control even more than they do now.

Small business and normal people will still do a lot of the work by hand because they will be priced out.

But I also suspect there might be a good market for hand crafted code similar to other hand crafted goods. Some people will prefer it.

[–] Bananskal@nord.pub 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If the entire software industry mandated AI, I would either create some kind of startup, or just reeducate myself into some other field, like landscaping or something. Because fuck AI.

[–] logi@lemmy.world 4 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

I've been thinking similar thoughts. I don't want my life to devolve into managing the fallout from the torrent of slop. Perhaps it's not too late to switch to geophysics. Those guys get to do fieldwork.

[–] Bananskal@nord.pub 3 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Might be good!

I just didn't become a software developer to generate output. I became a software developer to be a craftsman. To write the code is the fun. If that is taken away from me, I'm out.

[–] ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com 24 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

It's quite useful and fun to play with. Certainly not reaching AGI from scale alone...

I think we're reaching the top of the S-curve with regards to LLMs specifically. They're a neat gimmick and likely will have an important role to play, but I don't think they're going to meet the (completely artificial and grifty) hype Altman et al have been slinging.

Which was pretty easily predicted, but no one knew for sure. Such financial-class leeches always feed on unfulfilled hopes, and sell dreams of the future.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 hours ago

It's fun to play with for like 5 minutes.

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