North Carolinians Are Divided Over AI, and the Generational Split Is Hard to Ignore

Adults 18 to 29 are now the fastest-swinging age group on artificial intelligence (AI) in the nation.

A Gallup report published in late July found 47% of them now believe AI is doing more harm than good, up from 36% a year earlier, the largest jump Gallup measured in any age group.

Nobody expected the swing to hit hardest at the bottom of the age scale.

These are the generational divides over AI that North Carolinians and Americans across the country are feeling.

The Age Split on Chatbot Use

North Carolinians are living through the same generational split on artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots that shows up nationwide.

Nationally, Pew Research Center’s newest survey found that 63% of adults under 50 now use a chatbot like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot, compared with roughly four in ten adults ages 50 to 64.

Adults 65 and older lag furthest behind, at just under a quarter.

In North Carolina, that same divide shows up away from personal phones, too: Only 18.9% of the state’s businesses have built AI into their day-to-day operations, according to Census Bureau data the state’s commerce department analyzed.

Another 22.4% plan to adopt it within six months.

Nationally, that pattern holds: About a third of adults under 50 open a chatbot every single day, while only 7% of adults 65 and older do the same.

Adults under 50 open a chatbot on a daily basis more than four times as often as adults 65 and older do.

Confidence follows the same pattern.

About three in ten adults under 30 call themselves extremely or very confident using a chatbot, a share that drops to 6% for adults 65 and older.

The Youngest Skeptics

In North Carolina and nationwide, AI’s biggest skeptics turned out to be the generation everyone assumed would embrace it fastest.

Pew found that roughly half of adults under 30 think AI will hurt society over the next 20 years, the highest share of any age group it measured.

Older adults lean a different way.

Many say they’re simply not sure what to expect yet.

North Carolina doesn’t run its own year-over-year AI tracking survey, so there’s no state-level version of that number to check against Pew’s.

Gallup’s numbers point the same direction as Pew’s.

Its Bentley University survey found that 47% of adults 18 to 29 now believe AI does more harm than good, up from 36% a year earlier.

That was the largest jump Gallup measured in any age group this year.

Younger doesn’t mean less worried.

Schools’ Early Divide

North Carolina’s own classrooms show the same generational split playing out in miniature.

Raleigh’s local television station (WRAL News) ran an investigation earlier this year that found many of the state’s teachers are avoiding generative AI altogether, and many are barring students from using it on assignments.

Students describe a different reality: Many of their classmates use tools like ChatGPT as a shortcut on schoolwork and hide that use from teachers.

Nobody’s on the same page.

North Carolina’s own legislature is trying to close that gap.

The state Senate passed its version of House Bill 301 unanimously in June, a bipartisan bill that would require every North Carolina school district to adopt its own AI policy and set new AI-literacy standards for grades K-12.

The House and Senate sent the bill to a conference committee that same month to work out their differences, and it hadn’t reached the governor’s desk as of this writing.

If it becomes law, the Department of Public Instruction would partner with N.C. State University’s Friday Institute to train teachers on AI.

The state’s Department of Public Instruction saw that same generational contrast firsthand at a February conference.

About 1,500 teachers from across North Carolina attended.

The event’s own AI showcase was won by two high schoolers instead.

A ninth grader and a tenth grader from Cabarrus County built an app to help people find local resources.

State Sen. Joyce Waddell raised a related point during the debate.

Many North Carolina districts already lean on retired teachers who’ve returned to the classroom.

Those same teachers will now be expected to learn the technology their students already use every day.

One Thing Most Agree On

North Carolinians don’t agree on much when it comes to AI, but data centers are the exception, and this is one of the rare places where every generation lands in roughly the same spot.

A statewide Elon University poll found that a majority or plurality of every age group opposes a data center being built in their community.

Opposition ranges from 48% of adults under 30 to 56% of those 30 to 45, with 55% among the 46-to-61 group and 51% among adults 62 and older, according to the Elon University Poll’s own age breakdown.

Every age group, on board.

Support never breaks 30% in any single age bracket, even among adults under 30, the group that uses chatbots the most.

The opposition crosses the state’s political and gender lines, too.

A plurality of Republicans and men now join a majority of Democrats, independents, and women in opposing them.

Few issues in North Carolina politics cross that many lines at once.

Nationally, the instinct runs the same way.

Pew’s research found that at least six in ten adults in every age group it surveyed think AI is advancing too fast, a rare point where the generations mostly agree.

Older Adults’ Differing AI Use

Pew’s survey didn’t break its results out by state.

Nationally, though, older adults who do use AI aren’t using it the same way younger ones are, and nothing about North Carolina’s own numbers above suggests it looks different here.

Nationally, Pew’s survey found that 54% of adults 18 to 29 use chatbots to search for information, compared with just 20% of adults 65 and older.

Awareness explains part of that gap.

Pew found 66% of adults under 30 say they’ve heard “a lot” about AI chatbots, compared with only one in five adults 65 and older.

A similar gap shows up around fun.

A third of adults under 30 use a chatbot for entertainment, versus 7% of the oldest group.

Emotional support shows its own kind of gap: 20% of adults under 30 have turned to a chatbot for that, next to just 2% of adults 65 and older.

That’s a tenfold difference, even though the point spread is narrower than the gaps above.

By raw percentage points, looking things up is where the generations split widest of all: That 34-point gap between the youngest and oldest adults beats every other use Pew tracked.

When older adults do open a chatbot, it’s mostly to look something up, the same instinct that once sent them to a reference desk or an encyclopedia at the library.

The choice of app splits by age, too.

ChatGPT reaches 61% of adults under 30 who’ve used a chatbot, compared with just 19% of adults 65 and older, and Claude barely registers with the oldest group at all.

No contest there.