Video by: Aidan Walker, Elise Joshi, Chai Dingari, and Anthony Mascorro
We sat Bernie Sanders down with them for a messy debate that isn’t happening in the public right now. If we’re going to live with AI and push for a future that benefits working people, we need more conversations like this one.
TRANSCRIPT
AIDAN WALKER, MORE PERFECT UNION: Lately, it seems like nobody can shut up about how AI will change the world.
CLIP OF ELON MUSK AT THE 2025 U.S.-SAUDI INVESTMENT FORUM: My prediction is that work will be optional [because of AI].
SAM ALTMAN, CEO OF OPENAI: If I were 22 right now and graduating college, I would feel like the luckiest kind in all of history.
GLORIA CAULFIELD, AT UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA’S COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY: The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.
WALKER: But the young people who are inheriting that world sure would like them to.
CLIP OF CAULFIELD BEING BOOED
CAULFIELD: What happened?
FROM THE CROWD: AI sucks!
CAULFIELD: Okay.
SCOTT BORCHETTA, CEO OF BIG MACHINE RECORDS AT MIDDLE TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY’S COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY: AI is rewriting production as we sit here.
[CROWD BOOS]
ERIC SCHMIDT, FORMER CEO OF GOOGLE AT UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA’S COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY: If you’d let me make this point, please —
[CROWD BOOS]
WALKER: A recent study polling adults between 18 and 34 showed that they had overwhelmingly negative opinions on AI CEOs, and a recent Pew [Research Center] study found a majority are more concerned than excited about AI. But there’s a kind of paradox in these scenes that’s easy to miss from the outside looking in.
It’s this: Gen Z is the generation that uses AI the most, and yet has the most negative opinion on it.
That contradiction isn’t represented in the mainstream conversation about AI — which is framed online as a binary debate between Luddites who’ll never touch it, and diehard power users who are looking forward to superintelligent AI solving all their problems.
We wanted to hold a real conversation that gets into all of those messy contradictions and doesn’t simplify them into a shape that’s easier to swallow. To do that, we got 15 young people, ages 18 to 25, and Senator Bernie Sanders together in a room to see what they would say.
We got into their views on AI as it relates to dating, friendship, school, the job market, and the future. Whether they’re luddites or avid AI users, pro-market Conservatives or Socialists, pessimists or optimists;
Gen Z is doing something weirder and harder than just debating whether AI is good or not. They’re figuring out how to live with it
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT), TO ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS: [AI is] kind of like building a plane as it flies — nobody really knows where it’s gonna land.
CHASE, 19, WILLISTON, VA: AI is, without a doubt, this incredible tool and it’s like ‘How are we gonna use it?’
LIAM, 20, DALLAS, PA: [AI] could be all doom and gloom, or it could be beautiful.
SANDERS: [AI] could be [beautiful] but you’re sitting here with a bystander from Mars.
SILAS, 20, WASHINGTON D.C: Senator, I actually disagree with the statement that we should have the government directly take a stake in AI companies.
WALKER: We started by asking everyone some questions about AI to get a sense of their views.
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