It’s been almost three years since Silicon Valley started aggressively pushing large language model-based chatbots like ChatGPT as the supposedly inevitable future of everything, and there’s no group that has felt the pressure quite like Gen Z.

Like with many tech trends before it, it’s no surprise that young people are among the biggest adopters of AI chatbot tools. But contrary to the tales spun by tech companies like OpenAI and Google, polling data shows that Gen Z students and workers are a big part of the wider cultural backlash against AI. And even as they utilize these tools, vast swaths of young people are deeply acrimonious and even resentful of the AI-centric future that many feel is being forced on them.

Far from the stereotype of lazy young people looking for shortcuts, Gen Zers have had some of the loudest and most detailed objections to generative AI use. Their attitudes also reflect a much wider backlash against AI and the tech industry in general, which has recently resulted in a nonpartisan movement against data centers across the country and threatened both CEOs and politicians supportive of Silicon Valley’s AI frenzy.

Meg Aubuchon, a 27-year-old art teacher living in Los Angeles, says their response and that of many of their peers has been to avoid chatbot tools entirely. “It just makes me want to dig my heels into a career where I never have to use AI, even if that’s a career that isn’t going to pay as well,” Aubuchon told The Verge.

Emerging from academia and into the vice grip of an increasingly brutal job market, young people face an impossible contradiction.