Young People Are "Growing Up Fluent in AI," and That Helps Them

Gen Z and younger generations are often criticized amid the rise of ChatGPT and other AI tools, with complaints that students and young employees rely too heavily on AI to complete homework, write emails, and perform other tasks.

Some experts have warned that AI erodes critical thinking.

But Kiara Nirghin, a Stanford technologist and Gen Z entrepreneur, sees that comfort with AI as an advantage, Angelica Ang reported for Fortune Tech.

“The younger generation isn’t adopting AI — we’re growing up fluent in AI,” Nirghin said at Fortune Brainstorm AI in San Francisco.

Nirghin, who co-founded Chima, a U.S.-based applied AI research lab, explained that young entrepreneurs view coding as something done alongside AI agents, rather than independently and from scratch.

AI “fundamentally changes how you write, how you take tests, [and] how you apply to jobs or different applications — because it’s not from the ground up,” she said.

“It’s actually being able to do that with different models or agents, side by side.”

AI fluency sets Gen Z apart from older peers, allowing them to pioneer new use cases and applications that have yet to be unlocked, Nirghin argued. Some experts have warned that AI erodes critical thinking.

A 2025 study by researchers at MIT’s Media Lab found that ChatGPT users “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.”

But Nirghin rejected that view.

“The biggest misconception is that young people are using AI to not think things through,” she said. “[But] I think that really intelligent Gen Z individuals are using it to think even deeper.”