Recently, my four-year-old son has become fascinated with a new friend.

This friend has a young female voice, endless patience, and an answer for everything. Whenever he launches into a stream of imaginative nonsense that only a preschooler could invent, she responds with enthusiasm and encouragement.

This friend is not a person. It is an AI assistant on Doubao, one of China’s most popular AI applications.

My son is obsessed with space, black holes, and galaxies, and he keeps asking Doubao to show him videos. When the platform surfaces low-quality or obviously inaccurate content, I stop the video and explain that it may not be reliable. As a parent, I have concerns about AI-generated information. Yet I still allow him to interact with AI within reasonable limits.

I see AI primarily as a tool, much like the Internet or smartphones before it. It will inevitably become an important part of everyday life, and learning how to use it matters greatly.

That attitude is shared by a majority of Chinese people, especially among the younger generation, whose views appear to differ from those of their peers across the Pacific.

According to a 2025 survey of Chinese Internet users’ awareness of AI, more than 96% of respondents had some understanding of the technology, and more than 54% used it frequently or occasionally. More than 40% used AI for work, study, or daily life, a significantly higher share than in the U.S. and other developed countries. The Edelman Trust Barometer also shows that 87% of Chinese respondents trust AI, compared with only 32% in the United States.

Although Chinese people seem to have a more positive attitude toward AI than Americans do, they still have anxieties. But their concerns about the technology are different from those in the United States.

A Harvard youth poll found that 59% of Americans ages 18 to 29 believe AI threatens their career prospects. Gallup data show that 48% of employed members of Gen Z think the risks of AI in the workplace far outweigh the benefits. That represents an 11-percentage-point jump from 2025, alongside a 14-point drop in the share of Gen Z workers who say they feel excited about the technology.

A Harris Poll survey is even more troubling: Nearly half of Gen Z respondents believe AI has made the college degrees on which they spent years and money less relevant.

Data on Chinese youth paint a very different picture. Their main anxiety is internal: They fear that overreliance on AI will cause their abilities to atrophy, rather than focusing primarily on the external threat to jobs. A Tencent Research Institute survey shows that 77% of Chinese users worry about “skill depreciation.” According to a survey by China Youth Daily and Wenjuan.com, 89.2% felt that overreliance on AI had reduced their opportunities for independent exploration, thought, and serendipitous inspiration.

Meanwhile, 54.9% worried that excessive dependence on AI for office work might cause them to neglect their personal growth. Creativity and innovation, critical thinking and judgment, and communication and collaboration were identified as the three abilities professionals should do the most to safeguard in the AI era.

The 2025 China Netizen AI Perception Survey Report also reveals a structural shift in public perceptions of risk. Concern about “job replacement by AI” fell from 60.50% to 39.44%. At the same time, “overuse of AI leading to capability degradation” ranked first among emerging risks, at 45.79%. This suggests that people are beginning to focus on a longer-term internal danger: the possibility that relying on AI tools will weaken their ability to complete tasks and think independently.

American graduates often worry that AI will replace them, while young Chinese people are more likely to channel their anxieties into action. They are actively exploring ways to adapt. A joint survey conducted by China Youth Daily, China Youth School Media, and the social platform Soul App shows that 62.3% of respondents plan to “learn AI-related knowledge and turn AI into a tool that serves me,” while 59.7% intend to “enhance professional skills to strengthen irreplaceability.” In their view, the most important abilities in the AI era are not those needed to surpass AI, but those that complement it. Creativity, critical thinking, questioning and reflection, human-machine collaboration, and communication and coordination were identified as the five most important abilities to cultivate.

That is precisely what drives them to learn about and use AI actively.

The fundamental difference between Chinese and American youths’ attitudes toward AI begins with their contrasting economic outlooks and job prospects.

Young Americans face a high-pressure, low-hope job market. The share of unemployed Americans who are new entrants to the workforce hit a 37-year high in 2025, peaking at 13.3% in July before settling at 10.6% by early 2026. That figure is higher than at any point during the Great Recession.

Only 30% of 2025 college graduates and 41% of 2024 graduates found entry-level jobs in their fields. Among the class of 2026, 60% are pessimistic about their career prospects; job postings have fallen 16% year over year, while applications per position have risen 26%. That is the economic backdrop to the boos heard at several American college graduations. When AI is seen as a competitor poised to take your job rather than an assistant that can help you work, those boos become an expression of despair.

Young Chinese people also face employment pressures. But China’s economic transformation is moving faster, and its industrial base is more diversified. New job opportunities created by AI offset some of the anxiety about displacement. More important, China is in the midst of a transition from the “world’s factory” to a technological power. The government has made AI a national strategic industry, fostering a broad social consensus that everyone is in the same boat.

Recently, China’s Ministry of Commerce and seven other departments released the “AI + Consumption” policy, which sets out 17 measures to integrate artificial intelligence more deeply into consumer markets. The plan aims to bring AI into “millions of households and millions of shops” by upgrading everyday goods, expanding services, and strengthening retail infrastructure.

Over the past two decades, many Chinese citizens have watched technology directly improve daily life. Mobile payments, e-commerce, high-speed rail, digital services, and platform economies have transformed how people work, travel, shop, and communicate.

For many young Chinese people, technological advancement and social progress have largely moved in the same direction. As a result, AI is often viewed as the next chapter in an ongoing story of development and modernization.

The American experience has been more complicated. Many young Americans have grown up amid a culture of technological skepticism. They have learned to ask not only what technology can do, but also what costs it might impose.

Yet the most interesting aspect of this divide is that both groups are embracing AI. Both are experimenting with chatbots, image generators, writing assistants, and learning tools.

The technology is the same, but the perceptions are not.

When my four-year-old son asks Doubao whether a black hole could swallow the Milky Way, he sees a world full of possibilities. AI is simply another doorway to exploration and imagination.

Many American graduates, however, see an uncertain labor market, shifting career prospects, and a future that feels increasingly difficult to predict.

These starkly different levels of confidence in the future may be the most important AI story of all.