Gen Z Uses AI Every Day. They Resent It More Every Month.

Sydney Gill is 19, a freshman at Rice University, and staring at the course catalog with a question no previous generation faced at registration: Which of these majors will still exist by the time she graduates? "I feel like anything that I'm interested in has the potential of maybe getting replaced, even in the next few years," she told the New York Times.

She uses AI. Most of her peers do. A Gallup survey of 1,572 Americans aged 14 to 29, released this week by the Walton Family Foundation and GSV Ventures, found that 51% of Gen Z uses generative AI at least weekly. That number is virtually identical to last year.

Here is the part that should leave the AI industry exposed: the generation raised on screens, the cohort that was supposed to carry AI into the mainstream, likes the technology less with every passing month. In 2025, 36% of Gen Zers said AI excited them. One year later, 22%. Hopefulness bled out nine points. Anger spiked nine points to 31%. Anxiety held steady at 42%, because it was already high.

The AI industry has a name for this trajectory. Churn.

The exposure cure that backfired

In psychology, exposure therapy works by putting patients in contact with the thing they fear. Over time, people stop flinching. Silicon Valley borrowed the playbook for AI. Flood the classrooms, wire the offices, load the phones. Wait for enthusiasm to show up on its own.

Gen Z's data inverts the model entirely.

The Gallup numbers confirm it across every usage tier. Even daily users, the most favorable group, are markedly less excited than they were 12 months ago. Down 18 points on excitement, down 11 on hopefulness. Their anxiety and anger haven't improved either. "Year over year, among that super user group, they're much less excited, they are much less hopeful, and they are more angry," Gallup researcher Zach Hrynowski told The 74 Million. "So this is not a case of some people who are adopting it and loving it and some people who are just avoiding it and feel negatively about it."

That distinction matters. This is not a digital-divide story. Not a knowledge gap. Not a problem that more tutorials will fix. The people closest to the technology are the ones losing faith in it fastest, and the exposure cure is making the patient sicker.

What they actually fear

Gen Z's skepticism is concrete. It is rooted in a specific, measurable concern: AI is degrading the cognitive skills they need to build careers.

Eighty percent of respondents told Gallup it is "very" or "somewhat" likely that relying on AI to complete tasks faster will make learning more difficult in the future. Agreement that AI speeds up work dropped 10 points from last year. Agreement that it accelerates learning fell seven points, to 46%. More Gen Zers now believe AI will hurt their creativity (38%) than help it (31%), and the gap on critical thinking is wider still: 42% expect harm, only 25% expect help.

Recent research from the University of Pennsylvania offers evidence they're right to worry. Across more than 9,500 experimental trials, subjects accepted faulty AI reasoning 73% of the time and overruled it only 20% of the time. The researchers coined a term for this: "cognitive surrender." Unlike using a calculator, which offloads a specific task, AI encourages users to abdicate reasoning itself. The tool made subjects feel smarter. It made them objectively worse at thinking.

Gen Z senses this. A Wharton-led survey of 2,500 young adults, conducted last October, found 79% believed AI makes people lazier and 62% worried it makes people less intelligent. They kept using it anyway. One in six used AI at work even when explicitly told not to. That's the tell. It's not enthusiasm driving adoption. It's compulsion dressed up as productivity.

The entry-level squeeze

If Gen Z's cognitive concerns feel theoretical, the job market numbers are anything but.

Goldman Sachs estimates AI is erasing roughly 16,000 net U.S. jobs per month, with substitution eliminating about 25,000 positions and augmentation adding back 9,000. The damage lands squarely on the roles young workers fill: data entry, customer service, legal support, billing. Goldman's regression analysis found that in AI-exposed occupations, the wage gap between entry-level and experienced workers has widened by roughly 3.3 percentage points. Senior workers carry the institutional knowledge that insulates them. Gen Z doesn't. Not yet.

You can see the anxiety hardening into resentment inside the Gallup data. Nearly half of employed Gen Zers, 48%, now say the risks of AI in the workforce outweigh the benefits. That jumped 11 points in a single year. Only 15% see AI as a net positive at work. And 69% trust human-only work over AI-assisted output. The number who trust AI-only work? Three percent.

But the backlash has moved beyond survey responses. A separate report from Writer and Workplace Intelligence found 44% of Gen Z workers admit to sabotaging their company's AI strategy, entering proprietary data into public tools, refusing to engage, even tampering with performance reviews to make AI look worse. The word for that is cornered. Use the tool or lose the job, no third option on the table. Six in 10 executives in the same survey said they'd consider firing workers who refuse AI. Not reassigning. Not retraining. Firing. Run those numbers yourself if you think they're overblown. The squeeze looks different when you're 24 and the tool you distrust is the same one your manager put on your performance review. Some comply. Most fume.

Schools wrote the rules. Students shrugged.

The education system is trying to respond. Three-quarters of K-12 students now report that their school has AI rules, up from 51% in 2025. Access to AI tools from school computers rose from 36% to 49%. Among schools with policies, 65% now permit AI for coursework, up from 55%. An impressive pace, though almost beside the point if the tools arrive without the training.

Policy, it turns out, is not preparation. Only 28% of students say their school actually provides AI tools for schoolwork. Meanwhile, 41% believe most of their classmates use AI when they're not supposed to. Schools have expanded the permissions. They haven't changed the culture. The atmosphere among students looks less like readiness and more like collective side-eye.

One number cuts against the gloom. Confidence among K-12 students jumped 12 points: 56% now say they'll have the skills to handle AI after graduation. And the share who agree they'll need AI know-how for college ticked up five points, to 52%.

So Gen Z is preparing for an AI-saturated future. They just don't think it will be a good one.

Who loses when the exposure cure fails

The implications cut across three groups that cannot afford to ignore this data.

For employers, the "mandate and measure" approach to AI deployment is producing sabotage, not productivity. When you tell workers to adopt AI tools while threatening them with layoffs for noncompliance, you get resistance, not results. The companies getting real returns from AI are investing in collaboration models, not compliance frameworks. Gen Z workers are not lazy. They are defensive. Treat the fear, and the adoption follows.

For educators, access alone is not enough. Schools have moved fast on policies, permissions, and computer access. The harder step is demonstrating that AI builds cognitive skills rather than replacing them. Handing students a tool they believe erodes their ability to think, while the research backs them up, makes policy wins hollow.

For the AI industry, this is the most consequential audience research money can buy. Gen Z is not the enemy of adoption. They are its stress test. They use the tools daily, they see the flaws, and they are telling you what needs to change. Curiosity remains their dominant emotional response to AI, reported by 49% of respondents. Higher than anger, higher than anxiety. That's your opening.

But curiosity minus trust is just watching a threat from closer range. The exposure cure made the patient worse, and she noticed. She'll keep filling the prescription for now, because the job demands it. Whether she fills it a year from now is an open question that Silicon Valley cannot afford to leave unanswered.

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Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: [email protected]