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> Freystaetter and Gottlieb both say that instead of their own generation, they are more worried about Gen Alpha and other young people that come after them, who lose their chance to develop healthy relationships with technologies when they become mandatory and ubiquitous.
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.
I have three (gen A) kids, of which two are of the age to have opinions on this.
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.
My daughter's a senior in college. She recently was part of a group presentation; she did not use AI to prepare for it, but all of the other group members did. She was the only one who could answer follow-on questions.
If you use AI to understand things for you, you're short-changing yourself.
I’m surprised to hear that she’s only now learning the lesson of group presentations - if you’re even slightly more competent than your group, you’ll be doing all the work and the rest of the group will freeload off of you. It’s not like the freeloaders would have been able to answer follow-ups questions before AI.
Good for your daughter but doesn’t that example tell us the opposite of what this article is trying to argue? If the majority of a group of young people choose to use AI for their project, that doesn’t indicate that the majority hate it. That would indicate that they like and trust it.
I mean…that’s essentially identical to group presentations in general. The other students didn’t do the work; what they don’t do the work with is irrelevant.
> 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...
Because history is written by the victors, the Luddites were painted as idiots who just hated machines for no reason or dumb reasons. This couldn't be further from the truth.
What is the difference between someone who (a) dislikes some machinery and (b) someone who (i) refuses to use some machinery and (ii) _actively opposes_ the use of some machinery by _anyone_, for example, through sabotage or violence
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
The nuance that’s talked less about is that both statements can be and likely will be true, but which way will the balance swing:
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
Gen-Z is pretty cool. The problem is a small subset of Gen-X and Millenials who have too much money and power and treat AI as if it is the Dianetics bible from SciFi author Ron L. Hubbard (who according to James Randi knew exactly what he was doing).
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.
You're delusional if you're implying that thinking AI is a threat to the existence of the middle class is coocoo.
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.
The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes. Synthesizing different opinions, summarizing them, and producing outputs based on statistics are things AI does well.
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.
>The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes. Synthesizing different opinions, summarizing them, and producing outputs based on statistics are things AI does well.
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.
> The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes. Synthesizing different opinions, summarizing them, and producing outputs based on statistics are things AI does well.
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.
> 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.
So you have quadrupled your income? That seems like the opposite of a collapse.
> The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes
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 think a lot of people have already experienced that LLMs are useless by themselves. Ultimately what can make them useful are humans who are directing them, who understand their work and have concrete goals, who know how to verify LLM outputs which always contain at least a few hallucinations that can steer entire session off the cliff. And the hatred comes from the fact that their bosses whose AI usage is for the most part is limited to writing and summarizing emails are rubbing their hands together when they can lay off everyone and have their businesses run by AI.
I think that comments like this are not helpful for humanism.
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.
Paywalled so I can't read the article.
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).
I don't think it's exclusive to young people, no. I'm a couple years older than you. All of my friends also hate it and make fun of it. Like some of the people in the article, I'm also looking to get out of the tech industry and find something else to do other than be forced to talk to shitty robots. If they want to fire me for not using their crappy tech enough, fine. I don't care anymore.
Fellow millenial here. I rarely use AI, for similar reasons. Not only am I worried about cognitive decline, I also have plenty of ethical concerns and I don't want to become even more dependent on US megacorps. Fortunately, I'm writing my own software and nobody can tell me which tools to use :)
The cool thing about the current generation of AI tools is how easy it is to uncover bias or an agenda in an article like this.
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.
The cool thing about critical reasoning is how easy it is to uncover bias or agenda in an article like this.
I suspect that as you rely more on a robot for this your own skills will atrophy.
And then how do you uncover bias in your chatbot? Do you ask it to analyze its own analysis? For that matter, what about the bias in your prompt, which LLMs tend to accept uncritically? Do your own preconceived opinions bias you against the argument made in the article? Are you using a chatbot to think critically about the article, or to avoid thinking critically about your own beliefs?
> 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.
Would this show bias of Gallup or of Verge or of the Ai training data? How would you determine which?
So are you outsourcing your thinking? You just prove the article's point
> The cool thing about the current generation of AI tools is how easy it is to uncover bias or an agenda in an article like this.
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 know that AI will ultimately just end up enriching a very small group of people with no change in prosperity for working and middle classes. CEOs are openly saying as much. For the past number of decades the rise in productivity has been completely detached from wages, it'll be no different this time.
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.
Previously on the Gallup study:
It's the latest form of elitism - like in less sunny countries it's fashionable to be tanned because it means you are rich enough to have time to hang around on the beach while in sunny countries it's fashionable to be light skinned because you are rich enough that you don't have to work in the sun. Disdain for AI is a luxury belief of those who are either talented enough to draw / write / code without or are wealthy enough to not have to.
Is it though? I thought elite engineers needed to consume billions of tokens monthly and/or pay >100 USD subscriptions to AI tools to realize their potential.
We're calling skills a 'luxury' now? Doing actual work to learn things?
This place sure lost interest in meritocracy fast once mediocrity became available to everyone.
> Disdain for AI is a luxury belief ...
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.
> 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.
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?"
I don't understand all the negativity in the education space. Ever since I read Diamond Age, the ability to interact with and interrogate works of literature, or science, or the world at large is EXTREMELY powerful for understanding.
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.
I don’t understand why people act like we just have to submit to the AI revolution. We can make this technology illegal, and shut it down completely. Why don’t we?
In tech, young people can complain.
Us, the older folks, are not allowed to complain, lest we get branded as old fashioned, unable to adapt, etc.
I think that AI can have value if used correctly, but there is a long list of negative externalities that we are not prepared for as a society. We need to pass laws or establish norms to mitigate as many of those as possible, but I doubt that will happen until things are already bad.
On the plus side, I believe AI will finally kill social media, which can only be a good thing.
>> AI is the future. But it needs human hands. The question. You need to ask is: your hands? Or Microsoft’s?
2 comments that smack of AI authorship, or if the above is human-created, god I wish they'd used AI.
The irony here is this: AI actually has the potential to absolutely level the playing field.
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?