The kids are not all right—about AI - Newsweek

When new technologies emerge—from CDs to the internet to mobile phones—the familiar pattern has been that young people are the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters. With AI, only half that pattern is holding.

This year, for the first time, a majority (55 percent) of American adults under 30 told the Pew Research Center they are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence. In 2021, that figure was 31 percent. Over the same period, the share who are more excited than concerned fell from 25 percent to 11 percent.

It’s not that young people aren’t using AI—66 percent of adults under 30 have used a chatbot, and 31 percent use one daily, according to Pew—the problem is that the longer and more they use it, the less they like it.

“I think the older generation is dramatically underestimating how much Gen Z hates AI,” Amrita Bhasin, co-founder and CEO of Sotira, an AI-powered surplus inventory management platform, told Newsweek.

Bhasin, who is also an OpenAI ChatGPT Futures honoree and was featured in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in 2026, said youth antipathy to AI is driven by fears of its impact on their present and future, from deepfakes to job losses.

Nikolas Guggenberger, an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center who focuses on law & technology, privacy and regulation, said the perception of AI among young people has “cratered” in the nearly four years since ChatGPT hit the market.

A Gallup poll fielded earlier this year found that half of Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) use generative AI weekly or daily, roughly unchanged from a year earlier. But everything else in their survey moved: Excitement fell to 22 percent, down 14 points. Anger rose nine points to 31 percent. The share saying AI’s risks outweigh its benefits in the workplace climbed from 37 percent to 48 percent and 80 percent said they worry about AI hindering their ability to learn. While familiarity with new technologies has often been the path to acceptance, with AI and young people, it’s producing hostility.

Those views are already hardening into policy preferences. In an August poll of adults aged 18 to 34 published by CNBC/Generation Labs, 60 percent said data center construction should slow down, 40 percent said the government should regulate AI and 45 percent expected AI to hurt their own careers. Millennials view the issue of AI differently from their Gen Z peers. In the Pew survey, 48 percent of adults under 30 said they expect AI to have a negative effect on society, compared with 39 percent of those aged 30 to 49, even though both groups use chatbots at similar rates.

Author and generational futurist Ryan Vet attributes part of this split to the way millennials experienced quick changes. They saw flip phones evolve into smart phones and witnessed social media eat the world. The technological evolution Gen Z has witnessed is the iPhone becoming a slightly better iPhone.

AI is outpacing those older technological shifts in terms of evolution and adoption—it took years for more than half of U.S. adults to adopt social media, while it took ChatGPT just two months to reach over 100 million users—but with less clarity of where the transformation is headed. Vet calls this a velocity gap: “Technology is accelerating faster than human wisdom can keep up.”

“[Gen Z] have grown up in a world where content is just prolific everywhere and being constantly generated, and so they’re already in the mindset of ‘verify then trust,’” Vet said. “And I think the previous generations were in [the mindset] ‘trust but verify.’”

And they are not giving AI providers any benefit of the doubt. In the CNBC/Generation Labs poll, 69 percent said they don’t trust OpenAI’s Sam Altman, 70 percent said the same of Elon Musk and 71 percent of Mark Zuckerberg.

“AI leaders need to take accountability for the fact that their technology is really disrupting everything, and they don’t have a plan,” Bhasin said. “But I think the government also needs to take accountability because the plan needs to be a combination of the public and the private sector.”

It will be a while before a significant bloc of Gen Z is walking the halls of Congress, with the average age of a House or Senate member around 60 years old and millennials currently accounting for about 15 percent of Congress. But Gen Z will become a rising share of voters. According to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagements at Tufts University, nearly 49 million young people aged 18 to 29 will be eligible to vote in the 2026 midterms, 8 million more Gen Z voters than were eligible to vote in the 2024 presidential election.

According to a report from Brookings this summer, “the evidence suggests that Gen Z’s reservations about AI are more than superficial or based on public narratives.” Earning Gen Z’s trust in AI will require specific protective policies, not voluntary pledges from tech companies.

The trajectory of Facebook serves as a lesson: In the 2010s, Facebook was going to change the world, improve education, rally political support for change and shatter loneliness. Today, schools are banning iPhones, governments are issuing age restrictions for social media and Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta reached a $17 billion settlement in a suit alleging it was selling kids an addictive product that harmed their mental health.

“Gen Z and Gen Alpha are probably going to be the pressure testers or victims of this first, and then I think it’s going to be a minute before they are the decision-makers,” Lindsey Cormack, associate professor of Political Science at Stevens Institute of Technology, told Newsweek. “It takes a number of years to get into a place where you feel like running for a political office that has the capacity to regulate this happens.”

The National Center for Youth Law in 2024 called for an up-to-date policy to govern AI, but also for lawmakers to listen and learn from the “most tech-involved generation” because “never before in all of human history have the sleek threads of technology been so tightly woven into the tender fabric of a child’s daily existence.”

Audra Watson, the chief youth engagement officer at the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, said the young people she works with understand the risks of AI and want to learn how to use the tool ethically and responsibly.

"What we know from young people is that they are engaged, they have ideas, but what they don't have is sometimes they don't know where to start, and so that's the sort of work that we give them," she said, adding that lawmakers need to make spaces where young people's ideas can be shared and supported.

Looking ahead, Guggenberger said this all points to a trend in the U.S. toward more regulation of AI. That might come through localized policies on data center construction, restrictions on use for minors and labor protections.

“We have seen people that are underrepresented in the formal halls of politics express their views and exert influence through other channels, through civil society or just through spontaneous organization,” Guggenberger said. “One shouldn’t discount those avenues of influence.”

Lawmakers are writing the first rules for a technology whose politics have not stopped moving, for people who will have to live with the results of those rules long after their terms in office have expired.