There’s something deeply counterintuitive buried in some recent Gallup figures, and I think it’s worth sitting with for a moment.

The generation that has never known a world without smartphones, that came of age inside the algorithmic logic of TikTok and Instagram, that has more native fluency with screens than any cohort in human history, is also the generation pulling back hardest from artificial intelligence.

According to a 2026 study from Gallup, the Walton Family Foundation and GSV Ventures, only 22% of Americans aged 14 to 29 say they feel excited about AI. That’s down fourteen percentage points in a single year! Hopefulness has fallen nine points, to 18%. Anger has climbed nine points, to 31%.

Even among Gen Z who use AI daily, the people you’d assume would be the most enthusiastic given they’ve folded the technology into their lives, excitement has dropped eighteen points and hopefulness eleven.

The headline of the Gallup write-up puts it plainly: even the most engaged users of AI are less positive about it than they were a year ago.

Those of us who’ve watched several waves of technology arrive over the years, the personal computer, the internet, the smartphone, might have expected the opposite pattern. Older generations are usually the cautious ones, the late adopters, the people muttering about how things were better before. The young are supposed to be the evangelists, pushing the rest of us into the future whether we like it or not.

Not this time. And I think the inversion deserves more than a passing glance, because there’s a real possibility that the generation closest to this technology is seeing something the rest of us are missing.

What they might be seeing

Consider what Gen Z has lived through.

They are the first generation to spend their entire adolescence on social media, and they have the receipts. The studies linking heavy social media use to negative impacts. The slow erosion of in-person friendships in favor of group chats.

These aren’t abstract concerns to a 22-year-old. They’re memories.

Sherry Turkle, an MIT psychologist who has been writing about technology and human connection for decades often talks about the downfalls of how we interact with tech. She has noted,  “there has been a great deal of evidence that we have launched ourselves over and over again in technology dreams that have turned out not to be really in our human interest.”

Gen Z grew up inside that mistake. They know what it costs.

You can debate the strength of the evidence, and academics do. But the lived experience she describes likely resonates with the people at the heart of it.

So when these young adults look at AI and feel their excitement curdle into something more wary, perhaps they aren’t being irrational or contrarian. Perhaps they’re applying a hard-earned lesson: that “revolutionary” consumer technology has, in their lifetime, cost them things they can’t get back.

The thing they’re really worried about

Look closely at what Gen Z is specifically worried about, and a clear pattern emerges.

Eight in ten say it’s “very” or “somewhat” likely that using AI tools will make it harder for them to learn in the future. Forty-two percent believe AI will harm their ability to think carefully about information, compared to just 25% who believe it will help. Thirty-eight percent expect it to hurt their ability to come up with new ideas independently.

These aren’t surface-level concerns about job displacement or sci-fi scenarios. They’re concerns about cognition itself. About what happens to a mind that quietly outsources its thinking.

And they’re being voiced by the people best placed to notice the difference, because they’re still in school, still building the mental muscles that AI threatens to leave unused.

Let me explain why this matters.

How many of us, in our own working lives, have noticed that we no longer remember phone numbers? That we struggle to read a long-form article without getting distracted? That our ability to sit with a problem and slowly work it out has eroded in a way we can feel but can’t quite reverse?

That erosion happened to us slowly, and most of us didn’t notice it until it was already done.

Gen Z is watching the next wave coming, and perhaps, to their credit, they’re saying out loud what we should have said the first time around.

At work, the same pattern shows up

The skepticism extends into the workplace, and it isn’t subtle.

Forty-eight percent of employed Gen Zers say the risks of AI in the workforce outweigh the benefits. Sixty-nine percent place more trust in work completed without AI than in AI-assisted work. Just 3% trust AI-only output more than human work.

This isn’t the voice of a generation that wants to opt out of progress.

These are people who already use AI in their daily lives. They just don’t trust what it produces.

There’s a meaningful difference there. They’ve seen the seams. The hallucinations, the flat prose, the confident wrongness. They aren’t impressed by a magic trick whose mechanism they understand.

What we might learn from them

There’s a temptation, when older generations watch younger ones, to assume our experience trumps theirs. We’ve seen more, lived through more, weathered more cycles. Surely we know better, right?

But it cuts both ways.

Sometimes wisdom is recognizing that the next generation has direct knowledge we lack. Our grandparents understood things about hard physical labor and self-sufficiency that most of us will never quite grasp. Our parents understood things about institutional trust and post-war optimism that we can’t really feel.

And Gen Z understands something about what it means to live inside digital systems, to have your attention, your mood, and your friendships constantly shaped by them, that those of us who arrived at this technology in adulthood will only ever understand from the outside.

The Gallup researchers wrap up with one careful sentence: “Concerns among Gen Z that AI may undermine skill development appear to be outweighing its perceived efficiency gains.”

Translated, the kids aren’t buying the deal on offer.

Maybe we shouldn’t either. Or at the very least, maybe we should ask them why before we sign on the dotted line.

The generation that grew up inside the last great consumer-tech revolution is telling us, in unusually clear terms, that they don’t want to make the same trade twice.

That’s not technophobia. That’s experience.

The bottom line

I think it’s easy to assume that the people most fluent in a technology are also its biggest fans. That’s true sometimes, but it’s not a rule. Sometimes the most fluent users are the ones who have seen the costs up close.

If you’re worried about what AI might be doing to your ability to think, write, and create, you’re not alone. And you’re not behind the times either. You might just be paying attention.

I’m not saying we should all delete our AI tools and go back to the encyclopedia. I use them every day. They’re useful, often genuinely so. But useful isn’t the same as harmless.

Maybe the right move, for those of us older than 30 too, is to approach these tools the way Gen Z seems to be approaching them. Carefully. Skeptically. With one eye on what they give us and the other on what they quietly take.