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.
1 hourYou get “attempted murder” in America for setting a wall on fire and smashing glass?
In France, thats a Tuesday.
- Texas_Hangover@lemmy.radioEnglish1 hour
Our prosecutors like to throw a bunch of heinous charges and see what sticks. Its how they get people to agree with plea bargains.
Yup, we have an insane amount of laws and no one can actually read through and remember the entire legal code.
The average American unwittingly commits 3 felonies a day.
- Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zipEnglish28 minutes
But it’s not violent to threaten and destroy people’s lives and livelihoods with your humanity cleansing technology.
Shit makes no sense.
- barnacul@lemmy.worldEnglish33 minutes
In the US you get charged with a bunch of bullshit as an intimidation tactic (or often for propaganda reasons). In court it gets haggled down to the actual charges. No penalty for prosecutors doing this.
- 4 hours
Don’t forget Iran threatening to bomb the Stargate datacenter.
- cecilkorik@piefed.caEnglish6 hours
Despite the fact that more than half of Gen Z living in the U.S. uses AI regularly,
Of course they do. How the fuck do you not use AI regularly? It’s not like they give you any choice, even if you hate it. There isn’t some magic “No-AI” phone number or site that I can use to call or chat with my bank’s support people.
Saying you don’t use AI is like saying you don’t use the power grid. Sure it’s technically possible to strictly avoid it without exception if you really hate it that much, but like with the power grid you pretty much have to abandon all modern life and go live in a remote cabin in the middle of the woods and realistically almost nobody hates it so much they’re going to do that. (Ironically the latter is actually getting easier with solar power and renewables, while avoiding AI gets harder, I’m sure AI solar panels are coming soon at the rate things are going…)
- ragnar_ok@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish4 hours
we have meetings at my job about how we can work around the ai’s limitations in order to justify the corporate push for it. solution in search of a problem
- mrgoosmoos@lemmy.caEnglish5 hours
even my screenshot tool (Samsung) on my phone is called “ai-something or other”. when they made the switch, it became laggy, unresponsive, generally slow to use, and far shittier than it was before.
great branding for AI, though, or something
- 5 hours
I’d disagree with that definition. It’s a little like saying that a pedestrian who got hit and dragged by a car was “driving”. At best, it’s someone else forcing their usage upon you. In the cases you mentioned, it is someone else (usually a company looking to save on customer service) who is using AI. The users are the pedestrians in this case, and the companies using AI are the car.
- jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish4 hours
I think that would apply to people tricked into reading/watching AI slop video, but I think his definition is a likely one that could apply.
You try to google search, you get an ‘ai overview’. In a bizarre scenario, DuckDuckGo made a big deal of asking the users and showing the users overwhelmingly wanted to skip AI results by default, and duckduckgo still defaults to AI summary unless you take measures to opt out.
An analogy is dificult, but I suppose imagine a subway dropped off someone and there’s no stairs up, only a tunnel for a Tesla to take you to the next stop. You “use” a car, but were given no option to do otherwise because you were stuck underground and they forced you to take the car to carry on.
In either case, his definition certainly is a likely one for a Gen Z respondant to be thinking when they respond “yes they use AI”. On the flip side some probably felt as you do and responded that they did not use AI, because they did not voluntarily do so.
I’m a genxer. AI fucking sucks. LLM at Best. Hallucinatory shit bag at worst.
…igniting a fire at the exterior gate. No one was injured, but Moreno-Gama was arrested approximately an hour later outside OpenAI’s headquarters, where he was allegedly trying to shatter the building’s glass doors with a chair and threatening to burn the facility to the ground. He is now facing state charges of attempted murder…
Murder of who? The gate? A glass door? Pshaw.
- jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
Yeah, one would think that would blow a grand jury ruling. Vandalism, arson… ok.
If it weren’t an external gate and was instead someone’s front door, then maybe, but as it stands, it’s all property damage and attempted murder is a crazy reach…
- 9 hours
The state will protect capital. Just like Luigi, they wanted the death penalty for an alleged single murder of a rich guy. Meanwhile poorer people are free to kill each other and they go to prison, and get paroled. Mess with people who hoard the money and they’ll throw the book at you.
- lumpenproletariat@quokk.auEnglish8 hours
Rich people are free to kill millions of poor people via corporate policies, and they get rewarded.
Poor people kill each other and get locked up to be used as slave labour.
- FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.worldEnglish10 hours
I hope we see juries acquitting these people when their cases come before the court.
if you live in a common law tradition country like the United States, go read about Jury Nullification right now. and then shut the fuck up about it. if you are summoned for Jury Duty don’t bring it up unless directly asked about it.
142 activist groups. These need to be supported by the average householder. At the least they are holding the line for people’s future bills.
Activist groups should not be seen as an extreme, communities should be coming together to organize with them. Get involved and use skills and time to reverse this tide.
- Zwuzelmaus@feddit.orgEnglish17 hours
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.
Oh, the poor, poor money! Can’t nobody pleeeease help the capital?
LMAO
Imagine making 18k millionaires with that money. And the alternative is those blocked (likely for good reason) data centers.
- kat_angstrom@lemmy.worldEnglish6 hours
Oh no, corpos didn’t get their wishlist items, please be outraged on their behalf
- stickyprimer@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
I forget: is it Fortune or Forbes that started putting out gaming guides a while back?
- anomnom@sh.itjust.worksEnglish16 hours
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.
- greyscale@lemmy.grey.oooEnglish12 hours
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.
- brsrklf@jlai.luEnglish13 hours
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.
- nkk@programming.devEnglish12 hours
You could set your search engine to https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ so AI will still be disabled incognito
- 5 hours
I think they meant that even when you have AI disabled, the top search results are still mostly AI slop.
- keimevo@lemmy.worldEnglish7 hours
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.
- nkk@programming.devEnglish6 hours
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.
- k0e3@lemmy.caEnglish12 hours
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.
- CanIFishHere@lemmy.caEnglish18 hours
I don’t understand why they just don’t charge AI data centers higher costs for electricity, so they are a net benefit to the area.
Energy money doesn’t offset water consumption or other environmental effects.
- stickyprimer@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
Why make it complicated? Just hit them with a “we hate you” tax.
because they are in the pockets of key people involved in making that decision
- pluge@piefed.socialEnglish17 hours
How does it benefit the area? The money goes to the power cartels either way, and the data centers harm the environment and the people living near them regardless of the electricity cost.
- 18 hours
Many local government’s aren’t on the home rule, they follow some form of the Dillon Rule. This applies to utilities and land use. For some local areas they are required by some degree to follow the State’s allocation and billing of utilities to remain classified as a public utility in the State.
In many areas our legal framework at the State and local level were never made to handle what’s coming down the pipe with new advances. This is why I always indicate that data centers and their impact need to be addressed at the local level. That’s why I think Federal regulation is the wrong step for the building part of AI. This is very much a local and/or State level that needs to desperately be answered there.
The good news is that we see more people who are involved with their local government with this issue. But this underlying issue has been one since the 1970s, it’s just that these companies have hired firms that are incredibly well versed in the shortcomings of local ordinances and State law. It’s super difficult to patch up flaws in the laws when they’re being exploited at rapid fire pace.
- kylian0087@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish16 hours
The best thing that can happen with AI. Is for it to collapse and float the marked with cheap and good DDR5 memmory.
Ahhh a man can dream…
Even if RAM they use in data centers was compatible with consumer hardware, the companies would sooner burn it all and eat the loss than let us have it. They are sitting pretty right now - they have 0 reason to ever go back to the reasonable prices.
- 9 hours
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
- balsoft@lemmy.mlEnglish6 hours
Many labor movements throughout history started out due to advances in automation resulting in unemployment and rising inequality. This time around there’s also a huge cost of living crisis too, so things are lining up (you might hear “contradictions are sharpening” in marxist circles). If anything I’d have expected violence to start sooner and be more widespread, if someone gets laid off due to AI in this job market they literally have nothing to lose at this point.
- uienia@lemmy.worldEnglish9 hours
How the fuck is it not? If you have been following developments, these oligarch techbros are basically the US government, they are crashing the economy for their shortsighted profit and complete control over the consumer electronics market via cartels, causing rising prices on everything, not to mention they are using their tech for dystopian things like palantir, surveillance and other autocratic things.
- [object Object]@lemmy.caEnglish17 hours
Tell people they’re not going to have any way to get food or shelter and that they’ll be forever locked out of any security or safety and they get angry.
- Zwuzelmaus@feddit.orgEnglish17 hours
How the fuck is this what radicalizes people
If you watch that Altman jerk, he actually tries to become the ruler of the world by means of his own tech.
- 17 hours
I think the online rhetoric around AI has been way more apocalyptic than the more vague and abstract political stuff. So Trump raped some kids, that’s really bad but that’s not something people feel the need to go out and risk their lives over.
But data centers are going to steal all your water and there will be killbots patrolling the streets? All jobs will be taken away and everyone will be reduced to serfs or killed as surplus population? Drum that into a sufficiently mentally fragile subset of the population long and hard enough and you’ll get them worked up enough to feel like they need to strike first.
- reksas@sopuli.xyzEnglish6 hours
its sickening that the billionaires could just openly reveal all the horrifying things they do to people and no one would care, but only if things directly affect your personal life people care even a little. They could livestream themselves cannibalizing a live child and it wouldnt cause anything but momentary outrage that maybe lasts a bit longer than average.
Its good that people are rising up against this shit because all the negatives are true, but at the same time i have started to feel we really dont deserve good things.
- XLE@piefed.socialEnglish17 hours
It’s a fact AI is effectively stealing water supplies, FaceDeer. Don’t be so glib about it.
And the extreme rhetoric comes from the industries themselves, including Sam Altman’s own mealy mouth. And from industry shills who get good money to pretend that the thing is powerful and dangerous and worth investing in. Yudkowsky, Hinton, etc.
