As part of the TUM Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (IEAI) Speaker Series, a December 2025 session focused on young adults and generative AI. The talk, titled “AI-nxiety & AI-gency: Young Adults Navigating Generative AI” was delivered by Dr. Jaimee Stuart, Senior Researcher and Team Lead at United Nations University Macau.
The session addressed how generative AI is becoming embedded in everyday life and shapes how young adults learn, create and relate to technology. With AI tools present across education, work and social contexts, the talk invited reflection on how young people engage with these systems and how they experience their role within them. In this context, Dr. Stuart highlighted the importance of digital literacy, critical thinking and psychological resilience.
Dr. Stuart presented findings from three studies examining young adults’ use of generative AI and focused on motivation, decision-making and perceived risks and opportunities. She noted that concerns and anxieties related to AI are not new, but take different forms today. She emphasized that AI-related anxiety is a legitimate issue and should be taken seriously. This anxiety was described as shaped by the availability of technology and by how quickly it develops. The pace of change was noted as something that can feel difficult to keep up with and hard to control.
Young people are often described as confident users of new technologies, yet this does not always reflect how comfortable or skilled they feel in practice. The discussion pointed to limited understandings of youth and AI use that miss how young adults make sense of these tools in everyday situations. She also pointed to gaps in formal education when it comes to digital literacy.
Dr. Stuart then presented survey results exploring how young adults feel about generative AI and why. Additional findings examined how participants assessed risks and opportunities, including how these views relate to frequency of use. She found that young adults tend to approach ethical questions about AI in context rather than through fixed positions.
The talk concluded with a call to include young people more directly in AI-related research. Returning to her opening theme, she stressed that youth perspectives matter for shaping future approaches to AI.
alignAI Doctoral Candidates Julia Li, Simay Toplu and Mohaned Bahr joined the session and reflected on the relevance of these insights for their own research on human-centred and responsible AI.
We thank Dr. Stuart for sharing her work and for engaging with the IEAI community on this important topic. We also thank all participants and the TUM Think Tank for hosting.
The recording of the event can be found here: