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‘More harmful than helpful’: young people sour on AI<br>Gen Z uses the technology more than anyone, but many fear it is weakening their job prospects and creativity
For many graduates, AI has turned job hunting into an arms race © FT montage/Getty Images
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Jamie John in London
PublishedJune 1 2026
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Young people were promised that artificial intelligence would make them more productive, more creative and more employable. Many now worry it might make them less valuable instead.<br>From software developers who fear being replaced to students who feel AI is hollowing out learning and creativity, a growing number of young adults say the technology is reshaping their lives in unsettling ways.<br>In the US, roughly half of Gen Z — those born between 1997 and 2012 — reported using generative AI at least once a week. Yet 31 per cent said it made them feel angry, up from 22 per cent last year, according to a recent Gallup poll.<br>Those findings were echoed by young people across three continents interviewed by the FT, some of whom declined to give their full name, who described a similar mix of dependence on and frustration with AI.<br>Misha, 24, who recently completed a master’s degree in computing at Imperial College London, said advances in AI had made his coding skills less valuable. “It feels like junior software developers are basically just micromanaging AI at this point,” he said.<br>For many graduates, AI has turned job hunting into an arms race. Applicants use chatbots to generate ever more applications while employers deploy algorithms to sift through the deluge, and candidates find themselves navigating multiple rounds of automated interviews and assessments before ever speaking to a human.<br>A recent study led by researchers from Stanford University found that on one popular “gamified” assessment platform, jobseekers would need to apply for at least 25 different positions to be almost certain of receiving at least one recommendation to proceed to the next stage of an application. Many graduates have described applying to hundreds of positions without having a single job offer.<br>“The world of job applications is broken”, said Lucy, 24, who works in marketing at a current affairs magazine. She turned to approaching hiring managers in person and sending cold emails in the hopes of being acknowledged by a human.<br>Céleste Collet, a 21-year-old studying for a dual degree between Sciences Po in Paris and the University of California, Berkeley, said that while she was positive about AI’s potential “huge impact”, she questioned “how many jobs are going to be left in the future”.<br>Collet added she used Anthropic’s Claude chatbot to help structure and research her thesis, though she wrote the paper herself. She had previously “loved” doing the work on her own and felt the chatbot “killed the exercise” but turned to it because of time pressures.<br>Beyond the workplace and the classroom, many complained that AI made it harder to distinguish fact from fiction. Lucy said the spread of AI-generated images has given politicians plausible deniability when compromising footage of them emerges. “When you see an image, that should be able to be used as concrete evidence. It isn’t anymore.”<br>“It’s bleeding across all aspects of the media,” she said. “You just don’t know what to trust.”<br>Eliza Castell, 25, who works for a British MP, said there had been an increase in politicians using phrases such as “I rise to speak” in the House of Commons, which OpenAI’s ChatGPT often uses when asked to write a speech for parliament.<br>She said: “There’s this anxiety that if you’re just using AI to do everything, are you not just proving your job can be done by AI?”<br>In the US, the backlash against the pace of technological advancement has been seen in university commencement speeches, where graduates have heckled speakers who have extolled AI.<br>Some content...