Let’s Talk About AI Shame

And how AI is impacting norms, culture, and behavior in young people’s lives

Within the same week, I spoke with two young people who were almost in tears, for seemingly opposite reasons.

A 17-year-old in California told me: “I constantly feel like I’m behind. I scroll through LinkedIn and see everyone my age starting an AI company, or posting ‘ragebait’ AI content to get attention for college admissions and jobs. I feel like I’m falling behind because I’m not using AI.”

A 20-year-old in Maine told me something entirely different: “There’s this intense mass shaming that happens if one of my classmates uses AI for something. There’s this unspoken rule — if you’re using AI, you’re ‘less than’ everyone else. It’s causing everyone to use AI really secretly, and no one is talking about it.”

Same technology. Same generation. Completely different pressures.

There is a culture being built around AI — norms, expectations, status games, and shame dynamics that are shaping how young people relate to themselves, to one another, and to their own minds. AI is not just introducing new tools into young people’s lives, it is introducing new social norms about what it means to be productive, capable, original, employable, and “ahead.”

One of the clearest signs of that cultural shift is something I’m calling AI shame.

AI shame is the tension young people feel about whether they are using AI the “right” amount, in the “right” way, according to norms that are often unspoken, contradictory, and constantly changing. For some young people, shame shows up as feeling behind for not using AI enough. For others, it shows up as guilt or secrecy for using it at all. Either way, the result is the same: young people are being asked to form an identity in relation to AI without much help, honesty, or language for what they are experiencing.

AI Identity

When a young person starts to internalize the idea that they are falling behind if they don’t use AI, or that they are somehow lesser if they do, it affects their behavior and self identity. It affects their sense of whether they can think, create, solve problems, and contribute on their own. It affects wellbeing — their anxiety, confidence, isolation, and willingness to ask questions openly. And it can affect cognitive development too, especially when young people absorb the message that their own struggle, process, and original thought are less valuable than speed, polish, or machine-generated output.

We can’t afford for these social, emotional, and developmental effects to be treated as a secondary issue. Addressing these effects must be a core pillar of AI literacy.

What we’re missing when we talk about AI literacy

When I ask adults what AI literacy means, I hear a lot about tools, prompts, and workflows…how to use ChatGPT effectively, how to understand a large language model at a surface level, how to identify a deepfake.

These things are important, but they skip a more foundational question: what does it feel like to live in a world where more and more of your life is being mediated by AI?

That question matters especially to young people. Young people are still learning what kinds of thinking are rewarded, what counts as effort, what gets labeled as cheating, what gets labeled as ambition, and how much of themselves they are expected to outsource in order to keep up.

That is culture, and culture shapes behavior just as much as technical knowledge does.

When we asked 160 young people participating in Civics Unplugged’s Fellowship for the first word that came to mind about emerging technology today, many gave the expected answers: AI, LLMs, automation. But when we asked how they felt about those technologies, the answers opened up: dangerous, scared, excited, overwhelmed, curious, hopeful, confused.

That range of feelings and experiences is the real story, and it gets flattened when we treat AI literacy as just a technical skill to be downloaded rather than a human experience to be navigated.

The real skill we should be cultivating is discernment: the ability to notice how technology is shaping your life, and to make conscious choices in response. Not just, “Can I use this?” but, “What is this doing to my relationships, my attention, my confidence, my creativity, my sense of self?”

What if AI literacy centered questions like:

• Why would an AI company want me to use this product?

• Why might my teacher be nervous about this technology?

• What kinds of behavior are being rewarded in my school or my peer group right now?

• In what ways are these digital spaces serving me — and in what ways are they shaping me in ways I didn’t choose?

• What parts of thinking, creating, and being human do I want to protect, and what parts should be optimized?

Shame doesn’t create discernment. It creates secrecy.

Here is the part that worries me most: shame does not produce healthy habits. It produces hidden ones.

When young people feel judged — by their school, their peers, or the ambient culture around them — they are more likely to develop unhealthy relationships with technology. Shame drives behavior underground. It replaces open curiosity with secret use, honest questions with performative answers, and real learning with anxiety management.

We have seen this pattern before with other technologies. But the stakes may be especially high here because AI is increasingly positioned as a substitute for thinking, creating, and even relating to others.

The specific risk is not simply “too much AI use.” It is unsupported AI use shaped by isolation, pressure, and shame.

What we can actually do

None of this requires being a tech expert. It requires being willing to stay in conversation.

It means paying attention not only to the AI tool themselves, but to the norms forming around them. What is being rewarded? What is being stigmatized? What are young people learning, implicitly, about their own intelligence, creativity, and worth?

It means creating environments where young people can be honest about what AI feels like in their lives — where they can say, “This excites me,” or “This makes me anxious,” or “I used this technology and now I don’t know how I feel about it,” without being shamed, dismissed, or immediately corrected.

Because when that kind of openness exists, young people tend to develop more agency. They become better able to decide what they want technology to mediate in their lives and what they want to protect from it. They become more thoughtful and discerning. I get to see this every day with the hundreds of young people at CU.

It also means, as adults, being willing to change our minds. To listen. To recognize that a 20-year-old in Maine and a 17-year-old in California are navigating fundamentally different AI realities — and that both are real.

AI shame is real. And it is non-monolithic.