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.
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.