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.
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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.
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.
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.