College graduates have been booing company bosses who mentioned artificial intelligence in graduation ceremonies as “AI anxiety” starts “boiling over into public backlash”, said Business Insider.
The trend is “highlighting a gulf” between older generations who feel the technology “offers new opportunities” and Gen Z, who are “growing increasingly anxious” about what it “means for their future”.
Backlash and resistance
A Gallup survey in April found excitement about AI among Gen Z has fallen from 36% last year to just 22%, while their anger towards the technology has risen by nine points, to 31%. Another survey, carried out by Numerator, found that among Gen Z people who don’t use AI, 57% are not open to adopting it, compared to just 32% of boomers.
“Read that again,” said Fortune – “older Americans are more open to AI than young ones”. It seems that a “surprising segment of the generation that was supposed to lead AI adoption” is actually “leading the resistance to it”. For them, AI was “foisted upon them” by their “parents, big tech CEOs” and Donald Trump.
“Every technology young people have ever loved”, like video games, social media and the internet itself, came to them as “play or transgression”, but AI “arrived as a mandate” from schools and employers. Also, Gen Z prizes “authenticity above almost everything” and AI “attacks” that.
Young people “were sold on the promise that a college education secured a good future”, but now employers are “gutting entry-level positions” in favour of AI, said Denison University student Jack Jackoboice in The Wall Street Journal.
A global survey found that 43% of CEOs plan to reduce junior roles, so young people are “actively being written out of a future” they have “no control over”.
A backlash is taking shape. Some Gen Z workers are “actively sabotaging their company’s AI initiatives” by feeding sensitive company data into public AI tools and by “intentionally producing low-quality, AI-assisted junk work” to make the technology “look unreliable”, said Vice.
Existential melodrama
But Gallup found that over half of 14- to 29-year-olds say they use AI daily or weekly, and some Gen Z-ers do see an upside in AI.
The “danger” is that “economic anxiety” can “curdle into existential melodrama”, said Ethan Tran, a student at Davidson College, in The Wall Street Journal. “Fear underrates human ingenuity”, so young people shouldn’t “hide from replacement” but “look for opportunities that arise from the transformation”.
The CEO of Big Machine Records, Scott Borchetta, also gave short shrift to AI anxiety, when graduates at Middle Tennessee State University booed him for saying that AI is rewriting the music industry. He told the hecklers: “You can hear me now, or you can pay me later.”