Last year, researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University revealed startling evidence about the impact of using AI on how—and how hard—people think, finding that among more than 300 knowledge workers, leaning too much on AI tools like ChatGPT was associated with diminished critical thinking skills.
The study, mirrored by results from MIT-led research published last year, suggested that even using AI for low-stakes tasks such as proofreading “can lead to significant negative outcomes in high-stakes contexts,” like writing legal documents, the study authors wrote.
For the young generation of digital natives navigating AI anxiety around keeping up with peers using the technology and AI displacing them from jobs, the fear of the technology making people stupider is dominant. But that hasn’t stopped them from using AI—even when they’re explicitly told not to.
A new Wharton-led survey, conducted in partnership with Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation, found young people are ramping up their AI use, even as their concerns about it causing lazy thinking persist. A survey of nearly 2,500 U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 28 years old completed in October 2025 found 79% of respondents believed AI makes people lazier, and 62% said they had concerns it makes people less smart.
“What we find is deep ambivalence on how Gen Z is thinking using AI,” Benjamin Lira Luttges, a postdoctoral scholar at Wharton who led research on the report, told Fortune.
Despite these fears, Gen Z has increased their AI usage. The survey found 74% of respondents used an AI tool such as a chatbot at least once in the last month, up from 58% of young adults in the U.S. who reported having ever used the bots as of February 2025, according to Pew Research Center data. One in six respondents reported using AI at work, even when they were specifically told not to.
The paradox of Gen Z’s willingness to use AI in the office, even amid persistent worries about the technology’s impact on critical thinking, lays bare the young generation’s complicated feelings towards AI, according to the report’s authors. After all, Gen Z’s fraught relationship with AI runs deep. Nearly one-fifth of the generation is worried about AI displacing them at work, yet they lead the workplace in AI adoption.
Though they require some decoding, Gen Z’s tangled attitudes toward AI can be critical in designing a path forward for the technology, more broadly, to be best integrated into the workplace, Lira Luttges suggested.
“Young people lead the adoption of new technologies, and a lot of things that are often seen as fringe, as not mainstream, are adopted by young people and eventually become part of the mainstream,” he said. “So in a sense…looking at Gen Z is a way of looking towards the future of work.”
Making sense of Gen Z’s fraught feelings toward AI
Lira Luttges speculates the biggest mental factor informing Gen Z’s attitudes toward AI is simply a bias toward immediate gratification, a disposition more prominent in younger, developing minds.
“There’s a legitimate trade off between benefits and costs that you get from using AI,” he said. “Our brains are wired to prefer smaller, immediate rewards versus long-term, delayed rewards.”
As Gen Z grapples with finding or keeping jobs, as well as scaling their career ladders, job performance bolstered by an AI boost may hold more appeal than the less tangible threat of critical thinking skills loss. Similarly, even if an employer does not want an employee using AI on certain work tasks, that workers, particularly if young, would consider getting their tasks done efficiently as more important than disobeying their boss, particularly if the risk of getting caught is slow, Lira Luttges noted.
Anyone—not just Gen Z—could also fall victim to the better-than-average effect, a statistically impossible phenomenon of most people generally believing they are above average at a certain task. Gen Z survey respondents, for example, may see themselves as AI power-users, Lira Luttges said. Sure, AI could atrophy critical thought capabilities and make other people lazy, but not those filling out the survey.
How Gen Z will shape the future of work
To maximize how AI is used in the workplace, employers should not ban AI, but rather embrace ambivalence toward it, the report authors argued. According to the survey, respondents who reported using AI more frequently worried less about its impact on intelligence and motivation, indicating AI anxiety may resolve over time.
But resolving AI anxiety doesn’t address the question of AI use impacting critical thought. Some future-of-work experts, including Mark Beasley, professor and director at North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management, believe a critical thinking gap, not an AI skills gap, will pose a serious threat to organizational pipelines and business operations. Beasley told Fortune last month the threat AI poses to entry-level jobs could mean insufficient training and experience for middle- and eventually upper-tier positions in the near future.
“The biggest risk organizations face is just being stagnant,” he said.
But as long as workplaces are intentional about how they implement AI, Lira Luttges said the technology won’t cause a significant impact on critical thinking.
“For every task, there are two kinds of efforts,” Lira Luttges said. “There is effort that is germane to the task, that is intrinsic to the thing that you’re doing, and that that kind of effort is the effort that you put in, and gets translated into learning. But there’s a lot of effort that is just there, that’s just like friction, that doesn’t really teach you anything.”
“You should outsource the crap, not the craft,” he added.
