Meet the Gen Zers who have sworn off AI — and ask their friends to do the same

Alexis asked her manager to stop using ChatGPT. Delaney sees her eco-conscious friends making exceptions for the technology. Weezy said she tries to make sure none of her friends touch AI.

Much is made of Gen Z being the first “AI native” generation. Young people have grown up on AI, using it for everything from homework help to companionship, and thus can bring their skills with it into the workforce.

Many Gen Zers embrace AI — but not every young person is on board.

A McKinsey study earlier this year found that millennials, and not Gen Z, reported the most familiarity and comfort with generative AI. In a recent Slack study, 30% of millennials said they thoroughly understand AI agents, compared to 22% of Gen Z respondents.

A subsection of Gen Zers has come out fervently against AI. Those young people include both men and women, as evidenced by a multitude of TikTok comments and posts on X, though none of the young men contacted by Business Insider agreed to an interview.

We spoke with four Gen Z women to hear why they’ve become self-proclaimed AI-haters — and the lengths they’ll go to avoid the technology.

Alexis Rose Young, 23

As a marine biology student, 23-year-old Alexis Rose Young cares deeply about the environment. She said that she’s seen AI do “more harm than good.”

“I personally do really care about the environmental impact with the amount of carbon that AI requires,” Young said.

Thanks to the AI boom, data centers have led to an incredible demand for power, expanding their carbon footprint. A 2024 Goldman Sachs report indicated that data centers’ carbon dioxide emissions could more than double by 2030. A separate 2024 study suggested that carbon emissions for writing and illustrations were lower for AI than their human counterparts.

Young tries her best to eliminate AI from her life. She often uses Google to find companies that have integrated AI into their services so that she can turn the features off. She’s found some uses of AI unavoidable, like when her professor recently asked the class to use Grammarly.

Recently, Young’s manager in a customer service job used AI to sketch out what their monthly chalkboard design could look like. She tried to explain her concern.

“I was like, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be unprofessional and I don’t mean to be ‘too woke,’ because some people don’t respond to that,” Young said. “I did try to tell her a little bit more.”

Cheyenne Shoemaker, 24

Cheyenne Shoemaker used to work in mental healthcare. Now, she sees people recommending ChatGPT over therapy.

“A big part of the benefits of therapy is that therapist-client relationship,” Shoemaker said. “Our social skills have already been so affected by the rise of tech.”

Shoemaker was frustrated with humans talking to robots, whether it be makeshift therapists or customer service representatives. Also citing environmental concerns, the 24-year-old said she avoids using any AI in her life, minus a quick glance at Google’s AI overviews.

When Shoemaker heard that iOS 18 would include new Apple Intelligence features, she turned off her phone’s automatic software updates.

“There’s no reason for this,” Shoemaker said. “Why would I need AI on my phone?”

Many workplaces have begun requiring that their employees adopt AI tools rapidly to increase productivity. Would Shoemaker take one of those jobs?

“I think that would be a dealbreaker,” she said. “Ethically, I wouldn’t be able to do that.”

Then Shoemaker caught herself. The app she uses to get dog-walking gigs has an AI tool summarizing the pet’s personality.

Weezy Simes, 27

When asked for her feelings on AI, 27-year-old Weezy Simes had a quick response: “Hate it! Don’t want anything to do with it.”

Simes said that AI has been negatively affecting her work. As a florist, clients will come in with AI-generated floral arrangements made of flowers that don’t exist. As an Etsy seller, Simes has also watched AI-generated art and product descriptions flood the platform.

“My sales have been majorly down,” Simes said. “I know that some people have been protesting for various reasons, and I don’t know if it’s because of that, or if it’s just because it’s flooded with all of these AI-generated print-on-demand items. It’s like people won’t even want to look there anymore.”

Simes said she believes AI is “destroying communities, health, and the environment,” and is “responsible for creating a lot of garbage.” Aside from the in-app integrations where it cannot be avoided, Simes said that she has “never knowingly used AI.”

Her friends don’t use it, either. When ChatGPT first came out, Simes saw one of her roommates using it in place of a search engine.

“I gave her a big talking to,” Simes said.

Delaney Vetter, 26

26-year-old Delaney Vetter has “ethical and environmental” concerns about AI.

She remembers when Sam Altman said that OpenAI spent “tens of millions of dollars” in electricity costs on people saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT models, and when The New York Times reported that families lost running water access when Meta was building a data center nearby. (A Meta spokeswoman previously told the Times that it was “unlikely” the data center affected the supply of groundwater in the area.)

Vetter watches her friends use AI for increasingly simple tasks, like drafting a grocery shopping list. These friends, she said, are “environmentally-conscious, ethical, thoughtful people.”

“AI seems to be, in my perspective, the exception to the rule,” Vetter said.

As a food and beverage publicist, Vetter also doesn’t believe that AI helps her work much. Two years ago, a PR group she worked for suggested using AI to write headlines. Vetter was skeptical. When hiring an intern last year, she noticed that many of the cover letters looked like they were written by ChatGPT.

Vetter also said she spoke to one of her employees after noticing many of their email responses were “so clearly not written by them.”

Today, Vetter said that she doesn’t use generative AI at all in her work, though she sometimes finds herself tempted.

On Zoom calls, Vetter often sees her clients using AI notetakers. She sometimes asks herself why she doesn’t use one too — but she has her reasons.

“I’m going to be taking notes because then I’m going to remember what we talked about, and then I’m going to send them over, and it’s no different than them getting an AI recap,” Vetter said. “And, a lot of times, those AI recaps are really wonky.”

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