Why A Growing Number Of Teens Are Rejecting AI Hype

Move over AI-powered homework cheating and chatbot virtual friends—there’s a surprising new AI trend taking hold among teenagers: a growing share of young people think AI is deeply overhyped and simply not worth the hype.

It has been four years since consumer-facing chatbots entered the mainstream, and tech companies have cranked up their marketing campaigns for generative AI tools to a fever pitch. In that time, young people have grown increasingly skeptical of the endless buzz surrounding large language models (LLMs).

While many teens still rely on AI for help with school work and even casual companionship, data from market research firm YPulse paints a far more nuanced picture: 37 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds actively cringe at AI-generated content like music and videos, and more than half of all surveyed teens say they worry about the spread of AI-fueled misinformation and deepfakes.

Polling on young people’s attitudes toward AI reveals a striking contradiction. Usage rates are high — a majority of U.S. teens report using chatbots regularly — but overall enthusiasm remains sharply mixed. A recent Pew Research Center report found that while many teens expect AI to bring personal benefits to their own lives, more than one in four teens believe AI will leave a net negative impact on global society over the next 20 years. Their top concerns include mass job displacement, a widespread decline in critical thinking skills, and the heavy environmental footprint of training and running large AI models.

Young people have historically been quick to embrace new consumer technologies, but Melanie Green, a communications professor at the University at Buffalo, explains why AI is a very different case. This time around, anxiety about new technology is not being led primarily by older generations. Instead, kids are turned off by how aggressively adults and big tech corporations are pushing AI on them. Green adds that young people are also “acutely aware that whatever widespread disruption AI brings, their generation will end up bearing the brunt of the harm.” That weariness explains why so many teens respond to AI hype with an eye-roll.

On the social platform Bluesky, parents connect over shared stories of their kids’ deep distrust of AI, with many reporting that their teens use the phrase “that’s AI” as shorthand for “that’s BS” when dismissing low-quality or unoriginal work. On Reddit, educators share that even students who regularly use AI for school still worry about its long-term consequences, and many actively dislike AI-generated creative work like art and music.

WIRED spoke with young people, their parents, and their teachers to unpack why so many teens are refusing to jump on the AI hype bandwagon.