Being Anti-AI Makes Little Sense When AI Is Already Everywhere
Gen Z grew up with it, and what it replaces first is the repetitive work nobody wanted to do.
Try telling someone you are anti-AI, and then ask how they unlock their phone.
That is the contradiction Claire "Zoey," a venture investor who translates Silicon Valley stories for a mainstream audience on TikTok and Instagram, keeps running into. In her account, many people now equate AI with a better search engine or an AI girlfriend or boyfriend. In practice, she argues, it has been quietly running ordinary life for years in tools like Siri and facial recognition.
That is why she calls a Stanford finding that Gen Z hates AI nonsensical. That generation, she says, has never known a world without AI.
The clearer way to see what it does is to watch what disappears. Claire used to spend three hours every week building a funding newsletter by hand, collecting announcements, organizing them, and checking that every link worked. Now, she says, she can type a request, click a few buttons, and the same assembly work is ready to go.
She points to other uses people rarely put under the same label. As examples of AI, she names personalized cancer vaccines and elaborate Disney animatronics.
At work, she says, what goes first is the repetitive part that made people want to bang their heads against their desks. Claire describes Wall Street analysts staying up until 2 a.m. moving logos around and typing notes by hand, and says learning "the judgment and storytelling around how to pitch or how to tell a story around an IPO" is more interesting work.
Her point is that someone who uses Siri and face unlock to get through the day is already using AI, even while saying they oppose it.
Questions people ask
How does face unlock use AI?
Face unlock learns the geometry of your face from infrared images and compares a new scan to the stored pattern. The system is trained on many faces so it can still recognize you in different light, with glasses, or as you age, and reject photos or masks.
What is a personalized cancer vaccine?
Doctors sequence a patient's tumor to find mutated proteins that healthy cells do not have. AI helps predict which of those mutations will provoke an immune response, and a vaccine is then made to teach the patient's immune system to attack cells carrying them. The vaccines are experimental and usually tested alongside other cancer treatments.
Is Siri really AI, or just voice recognition?
It is both. Speech recognition turns your voice into words, and language models interpret what you meant and decide what action to take. Modern assistants add more machine learning for personalization, such as learning names, routines, and accents over time.