The Gen-Z backlash against AI is real and justified

Three university graduation events in three weeks made the news and went viral because of how they highlighted a very real and growing anti-AI sentiment percolating through society. We may be inundated with pro-AI propaganda from billionaire techbros, wishful thinking CEOs, shameless AI influencers, and a media bulwark of AI apologists, but most people in the world have either nothing much to say about AI, or are steadfastly against it. Young people are particularly roused to criticize AI, which is not surprising, considering how many leaders unironically brag about how it will replace most white collar jobs and gut the middle class, with rising fears of a permanent underclass forming in its place.

Eric Schmidt, speaking at the University of Arizona commencement, tripped over his own words as he tried to explain to a crowd of gen-z graduates that the thing they perceive as the biggest threat to their future prospects is somehow the key to their future success. I’m not sure it’s possible to be more out of touch with your intended audience. This is surely an olympic gold medal for faux pas.

Gloria Caulfield blithely attributed AI as “the next industrial revolution”, setting off loud boos from the crowd. Again completely misaligned with her audience of kids who are tired of adults spewing bullshit at them about a future made out of broken promises and rug pulls. She totally misconstrued why they all cheered when she said “only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives.”

These poor kids at Glendale Community College didn’t even get the courtesy of having a human being read their fucking names during the ceremony. The faculty had one job and they completely screwed it up by handing the responsibility over to an algorithm they obviously don’t even understand. What part of “generative AI hallucinates and often goes off-script” can they not grasp?

What’s astonishing about these reels is that they demonstrate the growing divide between those who are in the AI cult and those outside of it. Here you have the former CEO of Google and the VP of Strategic Alliances for Tavistock Development Company (whatever that is) saying things they hold to be true only because they live in a made-up world stacked with corporate yes-men and clueless management consultants — a world where common sense is traded for showmanship and profits always come before people. As for the educators in the third example, I assume they’ve been indoctrinated into the AI cult by their faculty administrators, who in-turn were inculcated by Tech CEOs giving out free trials to their mass cheating software like candy, or drugs.

AI — and I am talking almost exclusively about the generative or agentic flavor of AI throughout this essay — is giving the C-suite wet dreams about the end of human wages and the attainment of unlimited upside. And this has become a cult even quicker and more aggressively than the cloud computing cult that preceded it. Enamored by lofty manifestos and bulky powerpoints, backed up by LinkedIn propaganda and fake demos, corporate leaders have once again become mesmerized by technology that is more expensive, less capable, and more security flawed than advertised — all because it’s the newest iteration of the emperors non existent clothes masquerading as high fashion.

At Deeply Wrong, we’ve already talked about how leaders are making massive cuts to the workforce despite the technology being kind of inept and not up to the task. It’s probably true that most “AI layoffs” so far are really about companies rightsizing after growing too big, or providing a smokescreen for financial trouble hidden somewhere in the balance sheet. But there’s a growing trend of companies making cuts specifically because the CEO has full-blown “AI psychosis” and can no longer see any other way of doing business. I think this is a new kind of silent mental health epidemic that is going to have enormous repercussions in the next year or two.

And young people see the writing on the wall. The kids are alright, but they might be doomed. How can they not laugh and boo and jeer at the idea that “AI is the future”? Gen-z represent perhaps the most well-educated and diverse cohort of American graduates we’ve ever seen, yet they’re not finding any jobs after graduating. Where is the first rung of the career ladder when so many CEOs are basically announcing the end of entry-level positions? Anyone not born into generational wealth knows that the top 1% only stays on top by hoarding wealth and resources, not by sharing it, so any talk of an AI-powered utopia and a future of abundance is easily debunked.

Generation-Z hear slogans like “Embrace AI or get left behind” and recognize it for what it is: a desperate lie designed to make workers acquiesce to their own deskilling and contribute to the demise of their own career. The recent mass layoffs at companies like Meta and Cloudflare include hundreds of AI security and governance experts as well as agentic coding engineers and data scientists, so jumping aboard the AI train with professional zeal or kissing the hand of your robot-obsessed overlords does nothing to protect you from being discarded. And Meta recently came right out and admitted how they’re now monitoring and recording everything an employee does for the express purpose of training their AI systems to replace those same workers. Young people are not stupid, and they see this for what it is: a gigantic red flag that there is no future in knowledge work. This is extremely bad news for students who went to school for academic and professional vocations instead of apprenticeships and blue-collar training. It’s also extremely bad news for neurodivergent kids and kids with physical impairments who would otherwise have found a career optimized for quiet, often remote, mental work that is perfectly suited to them.

Young people are also tired of the barrage of extreme AI slop they’re encountering on their favorite platforms. You can see them lashing out at “AI artists” and “AI filmmakers” on Instagram and Tiktok. They are well-informed and rightfully disturbed at the environmental degradation necessary to perform such feats of sloppification, as well as the blatant disregard for other creators who had their work stolen or plagiarized by the unthinking, uncaring owners and users of degenerate tools like Midjourney, Nano Banana, and Suno. Gen-Z highly values legitimacy and authenticity, whereas generative AI is where legitimacy and authenticity go to die. There is hardly anything more egregious to Gen-Z than a person saying they “created” something unique when all they really did was order it from a vending machine that sells average-looking or average-sounding garbage made out of reconstituted stolen IP.

On the whole, young people today are more conscientious and socially progressive than their Millennial or Gen-X parents, so they’re not so easily hypnotized by products and services that are expressly designed for attention harvesting and privacy mining through dopamine reward systems and clickbait. Some of them are coming down off their social media addictions and eschewing smart technology for throwback inventions like dumb phones, or scouring ebay for retro devices like 2000-era flip-phones, Sony Walkmans and Gameboys. They’re trying to detox their lives after a decade or more of corporate indoctrination, privacy violations, social media grooming, and cyber bullying. And can we blame them? Any time I notice myself telling one of my kids to “shh” while I’m typing out a message or posting to one of my social media accounts on my phone I feel a pang of remorse and self-hate. Why’s it so hard to look away from this bastard glass? Why’s it so hard to put down this demonic Palantir? The kids of today don’t have the same access to their parents that we had, and that’s a tragedy. We were so distracted by technology that we didn’t notice how they were being stunted and brainwashed by it. By enabling them with smart-phones and tablets early-on we’ve left them nostalgic for a childhood they never had.

And what about schools? They invite big tech leaders to give commencement speeches because they’ve become the rockstars of the age. Our society lauds wealth and misinterprets the stock market as the economy. And nobody is immune to the myth of productivity and efficiency that AI companies propagandize to push their solutionist narratives. So it’s no wonder that when big tech came knocking on the doors of academia, the faculty welcomed them with open arms. Much has been written by real experts in the education field — I recommend following Miriam Reynoldson if you want to know what it’s like being on the front-line of the battle against the enshittification of schools. But suffice to say, AI companies have acted like street corner drug dealers in offering schools free samples to dole out to students, which has resulted in a plague of cheating and laziness that is eroding the whole premise of learning.

I personally blame irresponsible techbro fanboys like Professor Ethan Mollick at Wharton, who succumbed to AI hysteria in 2022 and proceeded to gaslight his own students and evangelize the AI industry to an embarrassing degree when he should have been doing his job of stewarding young minds. He’s since become a leading voice for AI in higher education and may or may not be a paid shill. In 2026, US schools continue to adopt AI at record rates despite a wealth of evidence that contradicts the marketing promises, showing how AI is eroding the learning process and reducing the cognitive abilities of Gen-Alpha students. An increasing snowball of parents, teachers, and cognitive scientists are trying their best to reduce AI’s negative impact on education but it may be too late for anyone graduating from high school in the next two or three years.

Again, Gen-Z knows this and sees all this happening, and they see the rising illiteracy rates of the upcoming generation. AI is not the cause or root of all their concerns, but it’s certainly an accelerant adding fuel to the fire that’s already producing enough smoke to engulf them and make them want to run for the nearest exit.