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.
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.
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.
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.
You could set your search engine to https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ so AI will still be disabled 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.
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!