Daybreak - AI is here to stay. The people using it every day aren't so sure that's a good thing

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

Gen Z was supposed to be AI's most enthusiastic adopters. For a while, they were. Then the hiring froze, the jobs disappeared, and the tools got good enough to make the question uncomfortably personal.Excitement about AI among Gen Z is down 15% since last year. Anger is up 9%. But the more interesting story isn't the sentiment shift — it's what's happening underneath it. Writing skills degrading without anyone noticing. Complacency creeping in. A generation becoming, in one colleague's words, more boring.The curiosity is there and so is the dread. And, often in the same person.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In 1997, IBM's supercomputer called Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, the then world chess champion. Deep Blue Kasparov, after the move C4, has resigned. It was a landmark event showing that artificial intelligence was finally cashing up to human intelligence. In fact, some of the best and brightest human intelligence out there. And it happened quickly too, considering that the match Deep Blue to won was already a rematch. Casparow had actually won their first skirmish just a year before that. Now, we all know that chess is often like a shorthand for characters' intelligence in Western media,

like Sheldon from Big Bang Theory or Sherlock Holmes in the movie where he's played by Robert Downey Jr. But when D. Blue beat Casparow, there was another game that people believed would be very difficult for AI to crack. You see, in Korean media, it has its own equivalent of chess. It's called Go. It's a game with a 2,000-year-old history where you essentially move white and black discs on a board to take over the territory and corner the other player. At the end of the game, the person with more discs on the board wins. Computationally speaking, Go was considered infinitely more difficult for a computer to crack

because in one game of Go, there are more possible sequences of moves than, then there are atoms in the universe. Enter DeepMind, an AI research company which was eventually acquired by Google. When DeepMind made a model called AlphaGo specifically designed to beat a champion human player at the game, no one believed that it would be possible. A million dollar price was announced and AlphaGo was up against a Korean player named Lee Sidol, an 18-time world champion who the Atlantic then compared to other sports grades like Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Roger Federer.

In March 2016, AlphaGo and Sidol played against each other for five games. AlphaGo beat Sadole 4 to 1. And in doing so, set the expectations surrounding artificial intelligence forever. Cut to exactly 10 years later and AI is no longer a specialized novelty experience. And it's also kind of poetic that its pre-2023 landmark milestones are about getting good at games that corner an opponent until they have no moves left. Because guess what? AI is still doing that.

Except it's not just Kasparov and Sedol watching as a machine beats them at what they do best. It's most of us. With the novelty of AI fading, something else is set in. Discontent. Anger. A sense of hopelessness. Especially for the generation that was expected to be the most excited for technological innovation. those who are usually the first to adopt and adapt with new tech.

Initially, Genzi was the most excited about AI. Assignments, research, sifting through job postings, writing university applications. None of it seemed as daunting anymore with a helpful little bot on the side. But then AI got better. It became bigger than a bot. Like, I just asked Claude what games it could play and it listed several, including chess, battleship, Scrabble. and it also said, and I quote, I can play go if you want,

though I should warn you, I'll be a reasonable opponent. It's funny, sure, but it's also a low-stake snapshot of what's happening. AI is smart enough to meet you where you are. It's ready to compete. And it's reasonably sure that it will be good at it. From a symbol of infinite possibilities, AI has become the very thing that's actively reducing them.

A recent study from Gallup and analytics advisory firm showed that while adoption of AI has stagnated for Genzi since last year, negative sentiment has only increased. Excitement about the tech has dropped by nearly 15% since last year and hopefulness by another almost 10%. Not to mention, the outright anger towards it has gone up by 9%. Most of it is due to the obvious. Hiring is on a low, job hunts are excruciating

and tens of thousands of people are losing their jobs either to automation or because companies are redirecting cash flows to AI initiatives. So the anxiety is real and it's seeping. Do you guys actually worry about AI replacing you? Yes. The way things stand right now, if you don't really figure out what are the skills that sharpen your expertise as a human designer or a human writer, etc.,

it's not about AI replacing you. you as in personally you being evicted, but the need for designers who just rely on execution will become extremely low. So the logical reason behind a company employing those many human designers who are only good at execution will point towards not having them. That was me speaking to Sushmita, a product designer here at the Ken.

I spoke with her and a few other Genzi employees who have increasingly been using AI in their workflows. I wanted to understand what their fears and tensions were, but also what excites them about it. Turns out, there's a lot on both sides. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Richard Wiggis, and every day of the week,

my co-host, Nikita Sharma and I will bring you one news story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Thursday, the 14th of May. The first thing I was curious about was if my colleagues were already seeing or were even seeing any kind of skill degradation. Vidharri, whom you may know as a producer of Zero Shot and Intermission,

had an answer that genuinely surprised me. She told me that most of the work she uses AI for is logistics, operations and organizing. Never writing. But it turned out that the skill that did see degradation was writing. I think I've gotten worse at writing generally, not because I outsource all of my writing to AI, but because I'm just inundated with such bad writing that somehow, how, like, through osmosis, that's the only way I'm able to, like, structure sentences now. I can't think of the last time where I've written a sentence where I've, I've felt like, felt like

it's, it's perfectly succinctly capturing a thought. It's been so long. I mean, I would have that more often, I would say, like a year, year and a half ago where, where I would write to clear my thoughts, where I would put something together and on paper, it would be much better than what was in my head. But I think with AI in the picture, we just surrounded by such bad writing. By bad writing, I'm just very similar lackluster, the monotony, the sameness of writing. And we're also reading that writing.

It's that regurgigation of just bad writing overall that I've just not had that moment of joy where I've put something together on a piece of paper and felt like that's a good sentence. And it's a very discomforting, very sad thing because I've always thought of myself. as a writer. And right now I feel like I don't know if that's a skill that I possess or if that's an essential skill that defines me and that's that's quite sad. But once you hear her explanation,

it does make sense in the larger scheme of things. An MIT study last year found that students who used chat GPT showed lower brain activity, weaker memory recall and less ownership of their writing. Even though their essays were well structured and grammatically sound, they did. didn't learn and retain as much information. Another study from this year found that about a third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated. The researchers wrote, The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation of semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy and other negative developments.

It's essentially a vicious cycle. The people who are using AI to write are just getting worse at it, so they're outsourcing more of their work to AI. We read that outsourced work, the AI we use is trained on it, and even those of us who are consciously making an effort to not use it for things like writing and reading, are affected by it. Vishnu, the Ken's ex-community manager and now video producer, had a related but slightly different answer to the same question.

Now, Vishnu also maintains a mostly work-only relationship with AI, and he says he barely ever used it about six months ago. His response to the question was pretty interesting, in that context. I think I've become too safe and complacent because I know there's a safety net of clod behind me. Like for instance, you are stepping into a meeting

that you have zero context about or you did not time to prepare or you did not have to read through. Pre-AI, you would have read some... You would have sort of something you have spoken to people, etc., etc. There was always an element of effort and you lose something.

thing if you don't do it, that feeling. Then now, you literally need a minute to type. I'm not saying I'll do it, but the thought in my head is, oh, I can always ask Claude what to do. And that danger I don't want to fall into. Where you don't spend enough time to think about it and you do, you have that, again, the analogy that I will use is in dark night rises. He does not have the rope when he gets out of the well. It's the same thing here.

if you don't have access to clot I shouldn't feel like oh what do I do now and I feel that is a very dangerous track that I don't want to fall into and I'm seeing signs that it's going that way and that's an important point right there

because almost 80% of the respondents to Gallup survey expressed concern that AI makes people lazier and 65% said that using chat pots promotes instant gratification instead of real understanding It eventually prevents people from engaging with ideas in a critical or meaningful way.

A separate Harvard Gallup study found that 8 and 10 users admit that using AI makes actual learning difficult in the future. Withhatri put it quite elegantly when I asked her if AI is perhaps erasing learning opportunities because answers are now too quickly and easily accessible. That discomfort is such an important part of learning anything or just existing. going through life and that is what makes experiences actually truly worth it. And we're erasing that layer of discomfort right now. There is no friction. There is a lot of joy in the process of thinking through something, hitting a wall,

going back, taking some time out, approaching it from a different perspective, and finally arriving at the conclusion. That's how you find your voice. That's how you understand what is it that you actually want to say. And that's what makes us like unique. and that's what gives like writers a voice, for example. And that is so important. And we're sort of erasing that cognitive work

and we're erasing that friction completely. And my fundamental problem, again, remains, is that when we do that, we are creating like people who are similar and uniform. We're like homogenizing people. And that's sad. It's just the sameness of it all is the most irritating aspect of it. I'm just fundamentally saying that we're just becoming more boring people.

What Vythri said right there isn't happening in a vacuum. A Cornell study last year found that when Indian writers were asked to write using AI suggestions, they wrote in an American style. That's because AI was prioritizing Western values and styles of writing and suggesting that the Indian writers adopt those styles while they were writing. The senior author of the study, Aditya Vashista, said that this was one of the first studies to show that the use of AI in writing could lead to cultural studies. stereotyping and language homogenization.

That happens when the linguistic and cultural distinctiveness of what makes Indian writers unique is specifically what gets taken away. With Hatri and Vishnu's fears about becoming boring, complacent, unable to learn and too reliant on AI is something most Genzi users do feel. It's more internal, more personal and individual than losing a job specifically, but they still worry about how it affects their quality of work. Of course, the degradation itself is real, but there has to be a way to work with AI

without having your skills reduced by these effects, right? My colleagues think so. More on this in the next segment. One of the biggest things that I've seen AI do really well is the actual execution or implementation of a design. What could have been done in 45 minutes can now be done in like two minutes. And witnessing that for the first time was a bit jarring because if your only skills as a designer lie in the attention to detail and craft execution of it,

you start to feel very threatened by it. And I did start to feel very threatened by it at a certain point. I imagine what Sushmita felt in this moment is not unlike what Caspar or Siddal felt when they were beaten by AI. You know, they were beaten by this thing that's not human that didn't spend years perfecting its skill, didn't spend money perfecting skill, and still it's doing what they do best faster. Not necessarily better, but definitely faster. Sushmida is also the person who said much earlier in the episode

that she did worry about AI taking over her work. She then went on to say, as you heard, that she was being more specific. She's saying that AI can take over certain aspects of her work, like simple execution of ideas, for example. That is definitely a. under existential threat. But there's one thing that she's holding on to and believes cannot be replaced.

But I think if I had to tie it back to one of my answers, this is where it becomes useful for a lot of junior and middle-level designers to practice that discretion, practice that judgment, and maybe even the overused word taste. Yes, taste is in fact an overused word, but it makes sense here and it's not going to be irrelevant anytime soon. Plus, Sushmita has also found a sense of fulfillment almost in, as she says,

getting her hands dirty by exploring with AI. Getting down and dirty to troubleshoot is surprisingly a different level of, requires a different level of expertise than creation in itself. You know, like in the landscape of a designer's career, a junior designer oftentimes tells, does what is told and also exercises some creativity. But then it also requires a certain level of experience and expertise. to be able to troubleshoot why is this not a design we would do?

Why is this something that we wouldn't necessarily go for? And that is something that a lot of junior designers using AI are having to polish and exercise. To train her dump-in turns, Sushmita found herself having to work at a sort of higher level. She was exercising a level of discernment and taste and that was setting her work aside, giving her work that sense of individuality

and her own personal touch. Giving AI something to work with and exploring with it was actually a running theme. Vishnu, for example, set another boundary for himself that seems to preserve the individuality of his thoughts and ideas. He believes that if your prompt is less than three sentences long, you're probably outsourcing the thought to AI. If you ask AI to write a LinkedIn post, for example,

that's not a prompt. You're just asking it to do your thinking for you. The trick lies in making sure that the ideas are used. yours, and that AI is consistently used as a tool and something to work with, and not something that's telling you what to do. Plus, it also seems like my colleagues are offsetting what the survey recorded as fears about cognitive slowdown and losing learning opportunities, etc. By doing the learning through AI. Surprisingly, it's happening more in their personal lives. Vishnu told me that while he doesn't use AI for much outside of work, he has been using it to create a

curriculum for himself. Basically, he's putting together a reading list and other materials to learn skills, subjects, etc., all on his own. Meanwhile, Karin, the project manager at the Ken, has set another boundary for himself. He'll use AI to put together research documents and to organize notes. But he still prefers to do all his reading himself. I just think our roles especially, I think the reading is my job. So I should be able to know what I'm reading. I think if I'm doing that, that's a bit lazy. But oftentimes the writing is just an output, right? For strategy communication, writing, the prose is not the purpose.

So there I just use AI to write the PRDs. But pretty sure I should have read what is being printed by the AI. So yeah, I prefer to do the reading on my own. And the work he outsources to AI actually does free him up to do something he finds more valuable. You can sort of go and do competitor research with creative inputs which AI can't summarize. So I try to make some deduble.

dedicated time and I probably go through the best sites out there. Like my favorite is godly, for example. That lists the best sites, how they look visually, which AI can't summarize, but before I have the time, I didn't have the time to do that. Otherwise, I probably read where prose is the purpose. For example, New York Times or other things where you want to read that writing, right? There I would not want AI to summarize it. So it does give me a lot of time to seek out creative materials now.

In an ideal scenario, we should all be having what current is. See, when AI takes over the menial process-based task, it should be an opportunity for us to do more deeper and creative work that's perhaps more meaningful to us and critically engaging. It should not become an opportunity to do more menial process-based tasks. But to be fair, it's still a sort of honeymoon period for my colleagues and I. There's an agency to how we use AI and to what extent. We're not trying to meet any output goals.

We're not under any mandate to use AI. And that's not entirely true for people in other sectors. Vishnu's graphic designer friends, for example, are fighting a whole other battle. I know a lot of friends, graphic designers, who are fed up with hearing this one line from the client. It's like, oh, AI can do this in five minutes. And they disregard all the craft, they disregard the thinking behind it. They disregard everything around it just because, someone else can do mediocre work faster.

So great work is being disrespected because someone is doing mediocre work faster. Vishnu did say it pretty well. Great work is being disrespected because someone is doing mediocre work faster. That cannot be a good feeling to have. And the thing is, it's not really going to get better from here on out. AI is fortunately or unfortunately most likely here to stay.

Granted, my colleagues and I are somewhat of outliers. But the experience we're having is also part of the solution. See, despite the negative sentiment, nearly 70% of Gallup's responders reported feeling curious about the tech. And maybe that's what we should be leaning into to deal with what's happening here. When I asked with Hartree if she would use AI if she didn't have to, her response was really thoughtful. We're at like a very curious sort of exploratory phase.

We're trying to understand what is. I can do for us and how we can integrate it into our workflows and in ways that works for us. So that's exciting. But yeah, if I was in a job where it was shoved up my throat and if my performance and my metrics and appraisers were all dependent on AI, I think it'd be a different conversation. With Hathri is right. It is in fact a different conversation and one we're not getting into right now because this is all. already a long and kind of heavy episode. Thank you for listening and please let us know what your experience has been like with AI.

Have you adopted, adapted, resisted? We'd love to know what you think. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Virgis and edited by Rajiv Sien.