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.
They’re good enough to act as natural language translators which is an absolute revolution for computers so they’re useful for automating some tasks that are too fuzzy or vague for basic programs.
This is what I’ve found among a lot of professionals when asked about AI. Every task it does could be easily done by anyone with enough domain knowledge and moderate scripting ability. It just cuts out the need to learn a CLI and scripting language in exchange for lack of scalability or efficiency, plus has more domain knowledge sets than any one person (though not too deeply).
E.G. It is often used as a poor man’s awk or perl for analyzing emails. But for a lot of people being able to scan 10000 documents, find all references to a soft regex and tabulate them is something they genuinely couldn’t do on their own before “AI”. Nevermind that you hand that problem to any sysadmin worth their salt and they probably already have an alias for it. Not surprising when you realize that the average person thinks that Penelope Garcia is an accurate aepiction of how such tasks are done and think such abilities are so far beyond teir own capabilities.