Gen Z believes using AI is making their colleagues dumb and lazy—but may paradoxically see it as key to their own promotion, Wharton says

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, 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 dumber is dominant. But that hasn’t stopped them from using AI—even when they’re explicitly told not to. A Wharton-led survey published earlier this year, 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 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 [about] using AI,” Benjamin Lira Luttges, a postdoctoral scholar at Wharton who led research for the report, told Fortune. Despite these fears, Gen Zers have increased their AI usage. Pew Research Center data published in June found 66% of people ages 18 to 29 have ever used an AI chatbot, such as ChatGPT, up from 55% in 2024. However, 37% of those young adults said they believed the impact of AI on them over the next 20 years would be negative, the most pessimistic attitude of any age group surveyed. The paradox of Gen Z’s willingness to use AI at the office, even amid persistent worries about the technology’s impact on critical thinking, lays bare the young generation’s complicated feelings toward 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.” What are 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 tradeoff 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 for certain tasks, those workers, particularly if young, might consider getting their tasks done efficiently as more important, 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 will Gen Z 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 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 have 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 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. A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on Jan., 30 2026. More on Gen Z’s relationship with AI: Gen Z is the most likely generation to use AI for learning—but 57% say they struggle to apply what they learn ‘The amazement is kind of wearing off a little bit’: Wharton survey reveals managers are learning what Gen Z already figured out Despite being decades away from retirement, Gen Z is the most worried that AI will derail their financial future—51% fear it will cut their nest egg