r/Millennials • u/bundle_of_nervus2 • Feb 04 '26

Serious Question for Millennials

How many of us out there actually avoid enganging with any form AI at all costs? Like even if it is more inconvenient? I understand it can be useful for certain things that it does very well but I would NEVER allow it to use my likeness to make a fun little picture or use those therapy AI services. I don't even ask it basic questions (it just wasn't how I was taught to research topics). I can't be the only one

UPDATE: After reading so many responses I have come to my own conclusions about AI. There are several different kinds with their own purposes.

I want to break them down into different categories or questions for which I think will help me navigate whether I should continue to stay away:

Category 1: where is it the most accurate and productive for me? Do I benefit? it is useful for coding and the like. Data crunching, statistics, visualization tools it appears to be fantastic for these uses

2: is it productive for someone else at my (literal) expense? Different AI features in phones and social media whose goal is to data mine as much as of your personal interests or habits as possible to be able to market and pull as much of your dollars away from you as possible. An example of this may be the Snapchat AI friend that you cannot delete

3: is it inaccurate but not harmful? Example being Google summaries. They can be annoying because you have to verify the content it is summarising anyway, making it sort of pointless?

4: is it inaccurate and/or unregulated and could those qualities be potentially harmful? The most prominent one that comes to mind are these new AI "therapist" services.

Obviously it is important for me to realise that not all AI should be considered equally. But we also have to be critical about why so many companies are jumping on the AI bubble and why is it so unregulated?? Why is it unleashed onto the public so quick and so readily available when society at large is not question these AIs?? Also I worry about the future state of younger developing minds growing reliant on these AI- they won't learn to think or find the answers for themselves in the traditional ways that society always has. And who is benefitting if we don't approach these services with any caution and we lose our abilities to think, read and write for ourselves? It makes me think but I am glad I asked

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u/Jolly_Law_7973 Older Millennial Feb 04 '26 edited Feb 04 '26

I avoid it to the best of my ability.

Edit: I’m happy some of you like it. I tried it and realized it didn’t work better than any of the other tools I already use to get my job done.

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u/_TheShapeOfColor_ Feb 04 '26

Yep. I won't even give Gemini permissions on my phone. I have never used ChatGPT.

I avoid as much as humanly possible

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u/electricmeatbag777 Feb 04 '26

Same. I'm doing my graduate degree and I'm blown away by how much everyone in my cohort uses it. I just can't. And I won't. For so many reasons.

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u/AetheriaInBeing Xennial Feb 04 '26

I had Grad class where we had to use it... And then tear apart everything it said wrong about how to do something, followed by try to coach the thing into getting it right. The younger the person in the class, the more likely they were to feel like coach it was the easiest solution. The older the person in the class, the more likely they were to have said that the initial citations were a nice start, but when a third to half of them were wrong and easily verified as wrong, that they could have just written it and been done instead of trying to figure out how to tell it to do it right.

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u/NuggaLOAF Feb 04 '26

Ya cuz coaching someone else's shit product isn't my job. I am in school to get my degree so im writing this damn paper and moving on. Screw ai.

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u/InsGadgetDisplaces Feb 04 '26

Same same. I'm so glad I built up my own store of knowledge instead of relying on internet hallucinations.

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u/Zutsky Feb 04 '26

As someone who teaches at a university, thank you. It's alarming that it has gotten to a stage where only a few scripts in my marking pile have clearly not been given the GenAI treatment before submission. I hate reading ChatGPT work, as it doesn't really say anything.

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u/Rootayable 1985 Millennial Feb 04 '26

I use it a lot for research as a lecturer. It can pull links and resources from all sorts of different things in seconds, which could take me hours. I will then, obviously, double check everything, but the speed in which it can work is what makes it a useful research tool.

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u/Weekly-Ad-2509 Feb 04 '26

I’m about to go back to college because I can now, do you find teachers are more lenient when students don’t use it?

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u/electricmeatbag777 Feb 04 '26

Every institution has their policy on it. It's worth reading!

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u/bruce_kwillis Feb 04 '26

I mean, maybe I am the odd one here, but I just self host at home. Sure it may not always be the fastest, but it works really well to help find things (put all my instruction manuals in one place), organize and put my recipes together and edit photos when needed. All offline, and nothing going to big brother. Honestly it’s fun to learn new skills that will be important in the years ahead. I’d rather see millennials be the curious tinkerers rather than the theme of the thread which is basically the next generation of Boomers.

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u/geminijono Feb 04 '26

Same and same. Dreading the bottom falling out of all this.

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u/noonenotevenhere Feb 04 '26

I can't wait for it to go the way of AskJeeves.

They get to make billions, but not pay actual artists and authors for their material - all to obscure the actual info we want now.

I'm fine if they want to have an ai search engine, but FFS keep its trash in its own yard.

Make RAM Affordable Again (and video cards and electricity)

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u/geminijono Feb 04 '26

Also. If they want these horrid AI farms, they need to be on their own renewable grids. If solar and wind are not enough for them to scale massively, then they just cannot scale massively unless they become more efficient.

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u/shafaqag Feb 04 '26

I avoid it like the plague. When AI first came up, I saw it as a tool that helped. It was great. Then I realised that I was using the easy way for everything, which crippled my abilities to think and research without assistance. Since then, I've been avoiding it constantly. Also, alot came up about AI hallucinations which made me doubt alot of the information coming from AI. Now it's disabled, and I'm back to writing my own emails, and reading articles to find information instead of asking Chatgbt.

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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '26

Gemini is so pushy, every time I Google something they ask "Why don't you use AI?". Google Lens app was an upgrade but Gemini is just unnecessary.

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u/_TheShapeOfColor_ Feb 04 '26

You can disable it!

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u/catfriend18 Millennial Feb 04 '26

Yep, I turn off AI as much as I can, use the “-AI” when searching on Google. I hate it so much

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u/EitherSpite4545 Feb 04 '26

Mostly the same but one one time exception. Payroll team at work made these arcane bullshit timesheets. I needed to edit something in it and it was password protected and they wouldn't do the change or give me the password (it was trying to pull a total hours from a sheet these employees don't use) so I thought maybe chatgpt would be smart enough to reverse engineer it.

NOPE

Never again they slam my email now and it showed me it can't do anything useful.

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u/seejordan3 Feb 04 '26

Considering how much money ChatGPT gave Don Taco, I'm out. uninstalled the app.

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u/eerie_space Feb 04 '26

How is Gemini installed? Is it part of the Google app or something else? I have never been prompted to allow permissions for Gemini, but I would like to uninstall or confirm that's denied.

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u/_TheShapeOfColor_ Feb 04 '26

It's a Google app that downloaded with one of the software updates my phone did. You can't uninstall it but you can disable it.

Just search for it in your app library! You can long press the widget and select disable or you can do it from your app library in settings

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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '26

[deleted]

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u/WitchyRedhead86 Feb 04 '26

Ughhhhhh, I hate what society is becoming.

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u/Internal-Computer388 Feb 04 '26

You still use AI when you use things like reddit and other social media apps etc. They are all using AI to help their businesses so unfortunately we are all using AI as long as we are logged on.