The generation most fluent in AI is also the most skeptical of it, because they’re the first ones living with the side effects.
A new survey found hopefulness about AI among 14-29 year olds dropped from 27% to 18% in a single year. Nearly a third say it makes them angry. Half of them still use it weekly. Both numbers are real, and they don’t cancel each other out.
The online reaction was more revealing than the survey itself. One person described loving AI for personal productivity while watching it corrode everything around them. Fake polls generated by LLMs, pet videos shared by grandma that are 99% slop, a neighbor producing meeting agendas that mix hallucinations with real contractor quotes, all adding up to a world that feels less trustworthy than it did two years ago. They still use the tools every day, they just don’t trust what anyone else is making with them.
That’s a product problem. We built tools that optimize for individual output and ignored what happens when everyone uses them at once. A 19-year-old picking her college major who worries her field won’t exist in three years isn’t being dramatic, she’s doing the math on an economy reallocating capital toward data centers and away from entry-level hiring.
Curiosity was still the most common emotion in the survey. People want this technology to work for them. The question is whether we’re building it that way.
