Gen Z Feels 'Doomed' by AI Content — Gen Alpha Feels Excited

Doom beats excitement as young people age, according to a new UCLA study — and the shift starts well before adulthood.

The report, "Rewrite This! How Gen Z and Gen Alpha are Redefining Modern Storytelling," comes from UCLA and the Center for Scholars and Storytellers. It's the fifth edition of the annual survey. Among respondents aged 10 to 24, 53.8 percent described watching AI-generated stories as "fascinated" or "excited," while 32.1 percent chose "doomed" or "scared."

The gap narrows fast with age.

Asked to complete the sentence "Watching a story with AI in it makes me feel…", only 9.7 percent of 10-to-13-year-olds reported doom. That figure climbs to 25.1 percent among 14-to-18-year-olds and 27.4 percent among 18-to-24-year-olds. Nearly half of the youngest group, ages 10 to 13, reported excitement instead.

What are these kids actually watching?

Plenty of it is what the study's own framing calls AI-native content, and plenty of that is slop. The report cites "Fruit Love Island," an AI-generated TikTok parody series in which anthropomorphized fruits with abs and cleavage flirt through 60-second ripoffs of "Love Island." It has tens of millions of views. TikTok began suppressing and demonetizing the videos as low-quality AI, according to the series' own website blog posts. It persists anyway.

The study also points to:

• Brainrot memes such as "tung tung tung sahur"
• AI soap operas delivered as vertical microdramas (short-form episodic video) from ReelShort, DramaBox, Drama Wave and Pocket Films
• Other AI fruit content littering TikTok

Respondents' feelings about AI largely came from these videos surfacing in their social media feeds, the study notes.

Why does the generational split matter?

The dominant narrative holds that Hollywood and tech companies push AI while audiences hate it — repulsed, even, by endless slop on their feeds and screens. The study draws no grand conclusions. But it suggests a generation gap: Gen Alpha, the kids now aging into the survey, may look more favorably on AI than Gen Z does.

One 13-year-old polled for the study put it with more nuance than most studio executives manage. "I'd like to see AI portrayed in a balanced and realistic way, showing both its benefits and potential risks," the respondent said. "It would be interesting to see AI helping people solve problems, learn new things, and improve everyday life while also exploring questions about trust, privacy, creativity, and human control."

What else did the study find?

The survey revisited questions from prior years. More than half of young people still ranked "see a movie at the movie theater" as their top weekend activity with friends, assuming geography and money posed no constraint — even though last year's edition found most of them actually watch on YouTube, phones, laptops or social media rather than TVs or theaters.

New areas this year included:

• Preferred themes: hopeful messages over partying and drinking
• Social media influencers in movies and shows: surprisingly, no
• Neurodivergence on screen: only 22.7 percent said films depict it well "yes, most of the time"

For an industry still litigating what AI means for its workforce, the finding worth sitting with is the youngest cohort's enthusiasm. The audiences now aged 10 to 13 will carry that disposition into the market Hollywood is building for. Excitement fades with age, the data shows. Whether Gen Alpha's wears off — or never does — will shape what "content" means a decade from now.