The middle distribution of Gen Z’s feelings about AI range from apprehension to downright hatred. Despite the fact that more than half of Gen Z living in the U.S. uses AI regularly, according to a recently released Gallup poll, less than a fifth feel hopeful about the technology. About a third says the technology makes them angry. And nearly half say it makes them afraid.
Gallup’s own senior education researcher, Zach Hrynowski, blamed the bad vibes at least partially on the dwindling job market. The oldest Zoomers, he told Axios, are the angriest, as they are “acutely aware” of the ability of a technology to transform cultural norms without a second thought, unlike a Gen Xer who is trained to see new technology as toys and are still “playing around with AI.”
Indeed, job prospects for the recently graduated Gen Z are abysmal; Bloomberg just reported that 43% of young graduates are “underemployed,” meaning taking on jobs that require less education than they have.
[…]
This is not just a Gen Z problem, either. In the American heartland, data centers are being proposed at a pace that local communities never anticipated and for which they were never asked permission, and they’re increasingly pushing back.
The numbers are serious. According to a report from 10a Labs’ Data Center Watch, at least $18 billion worth of data center projects have been blocked and another $46 billion delayed over the past two years owing to local opposition. At least 142 activist groups across 24 states are now actively organizing to block data center construction and expansion. A Heatmap Pro review of public records found that 25 data center projects were canceled following local pushback in 2025 alone, four times as many as in 2024, with 21 of those cancellations occurring in the second half of the year as electricity costs grew.
The concerns driving this resistance are less about existential AI risk and more about typical kitchen-table complaints; communities consistently cite higher utility bills, water consumption, noise, impacts on property values, and green space destruction as their primary objections. Water use is mentioned as a top concern in more than 40% of contested projects, according to a Heatmap Pro review of public records.
“turning revolutionary”
Please, in the West we’ve had huge societal crisis after crisis, crumbling rights, services, and stability, etc, and nothing has turned revolutionary.
You think people who are willing (if you look at supposedly developed, modern places like the USA for example) to put up with a clearly predatory evil healthcare & police system, fascist government, almost no basic workers rights, disappearing people from the streets into concentration camps, etc etc, are going to ‘turn revolutionary’ over ANYTHING?
We’ve had every opportunity, every chance to stand up and fight for what’s right for us and others, and the best we can do are a few days of mild protests with some cardboard signs (which, given how far we’ve allowed our rights to be eroded are just as likely to land us in jail, or labeled as extremists).
Turning revolutionary my arse.
Ai would be a good thing in a rational economic system.
Unemployment is only a problem for workers under capitalism.
Was it sad when people who looked after horses were made obsolete when we began mass producing cars?
Or people who stoked furnaces?
This romanization of monotonous jobs is silly, and sounds like it wants to thrust us into poverty for some idealistic fantasy that excludes productivity gains. It also seems unrealistic, you cant trust code written by a programmer that randomly hallucinates and cant reliably check their work or explain what they even did.
AI isn’t replacing monotonous jobs though. It’s being used as an excuse to cut good skilled labor for c-suite parasites. And it can’t even do those jobs as well. Garbage take.
I’m not sure AI will ever replace truly skilled labor, because it hallucinates. It replaces people who make PowerPoint’s or Excel documents.
I am a programmer who uses AI daily, as well as creating it.
Nobody is romanticizing jobs. The problem with AI is one of the contradictions of capitalism - businesses want to pay workers little and have rich customers.
Its also true that more efficient businesses increases living standards.
Faster please. They’re teaching it in public school in Korea now. I teach English here, and I get people telling me they expect me to teach it, too. Never mind I try to explain it’s intellectual property theft. They never much cared about that sort of thing here.
GenX here. Never actively used AI and have no intention to ever start. I don’t need it, I have my own intelligence.
It’s only really good at maybe making repetitive tasks faster. At the cost of our environment.
The models were made to be run locally on your own data, let the corpos in and they’ll find a way to destroy the world, screw the people, and add eshitification to literally everything.
Good.
This article is cope. AI continues bulldoze through society with no end in sight. We have yet to see the worse of it. It’s just getting started.
You get “attempted murder” in America for setting a wall on fire and smashing glass?
In France, thats a Tuesday.
You can get charged with assault on a police officer if a cop slips and falls while trying to assault you.
Our prosecutors like to throw a bunch of heinous charges and see what sticks. Its how they get people to agree with plea bargains.
the Central Park Five and the West Memphis Three are two of the most infamous cases of lazy cops pinning brutal crimes on groups of children and then coercing confessions out of them.
That’s really fucked up. It almost guarantees that there’s gonna be a percentage of people who are totally innocent but take prison time in a deal because they are threatened by too much more. In my country the system is the opposite - too lenient, which isn’t necessarily bad if accompanied by work to rehabilitate and reduce recidivism, but there’s very little of that either.
i posted this comment on the wrong comment, meant to reply to you.
Your comment is geo-locked - I can’t read it because I’m in the UK and Finland has made the frankly sensible decision to block UK users because of our somewhat misnamed ‘online safety bill’! TIL. Interesting.
oh i was just mentioning the west Memphis Three and Central Park Five as very infamous cases of cops coercing false confessions of brutal crimes out of literal kids, then giving them life/death sentence depending on the individuals in the cases. one kid took an albert plea in order retain his innocence in writing but was still inprisoned and seen as guilty in the eyes of everyone. harrowing shit.
Thanks! Yeah, it’s horrible. Plus some parts of the US still use the death penalty. I’m not immovably against the death penalty - some people are just that irredeemable - but it definitely shouldn’t be an option in any legal system that can’t be 100% sure about guilt. At present, none of them can be that sure.
Yes.
Yup, we have an insane amount of laws and no one can actually read through and remember the entire legal code.
The average American unwittingly commits 3 felonies a day.
Lol, I commit at least two before I even leave the house.
In the US you get charged with a bunch of bullshit as an intimidation tactic (or often for propaganda reasons). In court it gets haggled down to the actual charges. No penalty for prosecutors doing this.
Absolutely ridiculous that its happening in a legal court system that most people believe in too.
The assailant used chemical weapons in attempt to escape ICE.
Dude: I forgot to take my lactase and ate too much dairy for lunch and farted in his face while they were illegally arresting me.
I never knew this was a thing and it sounds very dystopian. Its almost as if these systems wants people to get as angry and frustrated as possible so they can lock them away.
But it’s not violent to threaten and destroy people’s lives and livelihoods with your humanity cleansing technology.
Shit makes no sense.
It does make sense, because money and power override whats fair and decent in a society. Thats why all the evil people want money.
Don’t forget Iran threatening to bomb the Stargate datacenter.
Would have made a great SG-1 episode.
It might destroy the center but I don’t think Iran can destroy naquada
They need to stop threatening and just do it
they’d give up leverage if they did it now. you know, you can only bomb a datacenter once. so they want to do it as a response when they get attacked next time, as a deterrence against the actual attack.
Despite the fact that more than half of Gen Z living in the U.S. uses AI regularly,
Of course they do. How the fuck do you not use AI regularly? It’s not like they give you any choice, even if you hate it. There isn’t some magic “No-AI” phone number or site that I can use to call or chat with my bank’s support people.
Saying you don’t use AI is like saying you don’t use the power grid. Sure it’s technically possible to strictly avoid it without exception if you really hate it that much, but like with the power grid you pretty much have to abandon all modern life and go live in a remote cabin in the middle of the woods and realistically almost nobody hates it so much they’re going to do that. (Ironically the latter is actually getting easier with solar power and renewables, while avoiding AI gets harder, I’m sure AI solar panels are coming soon at the rate things are going…)
My conspiracy theory is that they intentionally made the internet search engines awful to force us to use AI.
Its super fucking easy to not use AI regularly.
Of course they do. How the fuck do you not use AI regularly? It’s not like they give you any choice, even if you hate it.
I have never used AI. I am not a Luddite. It really isn’t hard to not use it. So far anyway.
As I understand it, the argument here is that it’s more insidious and it’s easy to accidentally use it. Google/Bing/DDG automatically using AI in searches, support lines forcing you through AI, Amazon using AI for review questions instead, etc
we have meetings at my job about how we can work around the ai’s limitations in order to justify the corporate push for it. solution in search of a problem
even my screenshot tool (Samsung) on my phone is called “ai-something or other”. when they made the switch, it became laggy, unresponsive, generally slow to use, and far shittier than it was before.
great branding for AI, though, or something
GrapheneOS is looking like a really good prospect nowadays
GrapheneOS is the best. I’ll stop using it when they pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
I’d disagree with that definition. It’s a little like saying that a pedestrian who got hit and dragged by a car was “driving”. At best, it’s someone else forcing their usage upon you. In the cases you mentioned, it is someone else (usually a company looking to save on customer service) who is using AI. The users are the pedestrians in this case, and the companies using AI are the car.
I think that would apply to people tricked into reading/watching AI slop video, but I think his definition is a likely one that could apply.
You try to google search, you get an ‘ai overview’. In a bizarre scenario, DuckDuckGo made a big deal of asking the users and showing the users overwhelmingly wanted to skip AI results by default, and duckduckgo still defaults to AI summary unless you take measures to opt out.
An analogy is dificult, but I suppose imagine a subway dropped off someone and there’s no stairs up, only a tunnel for a Tesla to take you to the next stop. You “use” a car, but were given no option to do otherwise because you were stuck underground and they forced you to take the car to carry on.
In either case, his definition certainly is a likely one for a Gen Z respondant to be thinking when they respond “yes they use AI”. On the flip side some probably felt as you do and responded that they did not use AI, because they did not voluntarily do so.
I’m a genxer. AI fucking sucks. LLM at Best. Hallucinatory shit bag at worst.
Gen X here as well. I’ve never willingly used it. Admittedly I haven’t had a reason but outside the summaries you get on searches et al I’ve never touched it.
I used it like 2 years ago to help write some copy on my web site, and it did fine. But it’s a novelty.
…igniting a fire at the exterior gate. No one was injured, but Moreno-Gama was arrested approximately an hour later outside OpenAI’s headquarters, where he was allegedly trying to shatter the building’s glass doors with a chair and threatening to burn the facility to the ground. He is now facing state charges of attempted murder…
Murder of who? The gate? A glass door? Pshaw.
Yeah, one would think that would blow a grand jury ruling. Vandalism, arson… ok.
If it weren’t an external gate and was instead someone’s front door, then maybe, but as it stands, it’s all property damage and attempted murder is a crazy reach…
You ever serve on a grand jury? It’s a fucking joke. No defense attorney, only the prosecution. Not technically allowed to consider the potential sentencing if eventually taken to trial and found guilty. My grand jury peers had basically no discussion before greenlighting every indictment. There’s no justice in grand jury indictments… Except the sandwich guy.
Very true. But it’s ass opposite when it’s a cop who’s charged.
The state will protect capital. Just like Luigi, they wanted the death penalty for an alleged single murder of a rich guy. Meanwhile poorer people are free to kill each other and they go to prison, and get paroled. Mess with people who hoard the money and they’ll throw the book at you.
Rich people are free to kill millions of poor people via corporate policies, and they get rewarded.
Poor people kill each other and get locked up to be used as slave labour.
I don’t know he context of this image, but I love it.
I hope we see juries acquitting these people when their cases come before the court.
if you live in a common law tradition country like the United States, go read about Jury Nullification right now. and then shut the fuck up about it. if you are summoned for Jury Duty don’t bring it up unless directly asked about it.
Stfu *until jury deliberation
The numbers are serious. According to a report from 10a Labs’ Data Center Watch, at least $18 billion worth of data center projects have been blocked and another $46 billion delayed over the past two years owing to local opposition.
Oh, the poor, poor money! Can’t nobody pleeeease help the capital?
LMAO
Imagine making 18k millionaires with that money. And the alternative is those blocked (likely for good reason) data centers.
Oh no, corpos didn’t get their wishlist items, please be outraged on their behalf
that’s fortune magazine for ya
I forget: is it Fortune or Forbes that started putting out gaming guides a while back?
Forbes will host/publish anything, so them.
142 activist groups. These need to be supported by the average householder. At the least they are holding the line for people’s future bills.
Activist groups should not be seen as an extreme, communities should be coming together to organize with them. Get involved and use skills and time to reverse this tide.
Normal people don’t see them as extreme, only fascists do.
I’m an Gen-Xennial or whatever and I hate AI because it’s ruining my ability to solve problems m with search results on the internet. I get imaginary results in the AI panels when I’m incognito and don’t have it disabled, and DDG has been completely fucked by Slop Spam websites in their results.
Then there are low price eshop clones that copy legit products at half price. The sites usually have a name so close that when checking trustpilot type places, they’ll “autocorrect” your search to the legit site that was cloned.
It’s finishing off the already largely ruined internet.
I use the custom search range on DDG. I just leave the date the same and set the years to 2000-2020. Before AI slop was most of the internet.
This is the best tip so far, I hadn’t thought of pre filtering it like that, I usually just look for older links in general. Thanks!
Thanks! Just passing on what I’ve learned before!
yesterday, I was hunting down documentation on how to get a piece of software (Garage) to create a default key and data storage bucket on startup.
Turns out, there’s this site that has a hallucinated set of environment variables to do exactly that with the exact container I’m using. They don’t exist. They never did. The only website with a reference to the environment variable is the “AI generated” 3rd party “documentation” site.
Now is the time of monsters.
Roughly same age group (I think? early Y), and yeah, exactly that.
Searching has become a battle against the terrible AI answers that misinterpret and oversimplify one random result while making it a chore to find actual good sources.
And of course gen AI is also to blame for these good sources being drowned in an ocean of content farms, those shitstain tentacular bastards stealing and garbling information beyond recognition. Walls and walls of text saying absolutely nothing, or complete lies, on every subject known to humanity, feeding on themselves and replacing everything else.
You could set your search engine to https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ so AI will still be disabled incognito
I think they meant that even when you have AI disabled, the top search results are still mostly AI slop.
I get imaginary results in the AI panels when I’m incognito and don’t have it disabled
This was the part I was targeting. I realize their point after this quote was talking about results, but I was just offering a solution the AI panels that they mentioned were automatically enabled incognito.
That doesn’t solve the problem: it only disables the duck.ai assistant, but doesn’t disable the search results that are normal websites generated with AI (the real issue here). To be fair, that’s not DDG problem specifically but every search engine problem.
The web is now full of these fake websites, which is a real problem because on the search results they look legit and only when visiting them you realize it’s AI crap.
And the funny (or sad) thing is that current AIs are being trained on these fake hallucinating sites, so even they are suffering from false information, which in turn is given to humans and used to make more fake websites and… the result is up to your imagination.
It’s the grey goo problem for the World Wide Web.
Of course, I never claimed to fix all of AIs issues, just trying to make it a little more bearable by getting rid of the search engine AI panel that they were complaining about. I personally use Kagi as my search engine and haven’t felt like there’s been too many AI crap results, especially after weighing websites I trust above others. Of course the irony is that a Kagi subscription comes with AI, but you can of course choose to use that rather than having it shoved down your throat.
Startpage is also an alternative. Privacy and no AI. Better than that DDG shit.
I was looking for a way to copy-paste microsoft word document content with the comments and the suggested edits to no avail. I finally resorted to asking Gemini and it basically gave me a bogus answer that didn’t work :(
Been a while since I’ve had to use that piece-of-shit in anger; but doesn’t the “save as” options give you the possibility of saving it as HTML but with all of those changes baked in? It’s easier to copy-paste HTML.
Imma give this a try! Thanks so much!
