Four years after ChatGPT came out, ‘AI natives’ are now graduating college with key skills missing

Back in January 2023, ChatGPT was two months old. A survey of 1,000 college students at the time found that nearly 90% of them had used the chatbot to help with homework. Within its first year of being launched, ChatGPT’s monthly visits increased month-over-month until schools let out for the summer in June, New York Magazine reported.

Flash forward to 2026, and ChatGPT and AI tools in general are constantly making headlines. A recent study by Gallup and Lumina Foundation found that over half of college students use artificial intelligence in their coursework on a daily or weekly basis, often in defiance of school rules. Even a few years later, the AI models have a grip on college students and their productivity.

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Now, as college students of the ChatGPT-assisted cohort start graduating and entering the workforce, we are presented with a new subset of people — the AI natives.

According to IBM, an AI native is “something — usually a product, company or workflow — that was designed from the ground up with AI as a core component, not bolted on later as a mere feature.”

Of course, in the case of these students it means they themselves have been closely intertwined with AI for the majority, if not all, of their college education. This raises the question: what happens now, as they enter the workforce having offloaded some of their coursework to AI?

Some AI natives are regretting their choice to rely so heavily on AI throughout college and now feel they have to pay the price.

For students who engaged in some level of AI-enabled cheating to get through college, it’s providing a mental block now as guilt over AI usage becomes more prevalent. Design magazine Domus recently traced “AI guilt” through Reddit and found an abundance of posts, many from students, discussing the guilt they felt for using AI to complete work. Domus conceptualizes AI guilt as another form of imposter syndrome, which is “the belief that one’s successes are not fully legitimate if they result from outside help.”

All it takes is a quick Reddit search to find many posts admitting AI guilt. One post from five months ago on r/academia reads “I gave over to use AI. Now I cannot escape the guilt.”

The user explains that they had been against generative AI, but when it came to writing their Master’s thesis they found themself using AI to help rewrite their own ideas and findings “in a more coherent, elegant way.” The user said they used AI to help them get their thesis done as they were busy with deadlines and working two part-time jobs. But in the end, they said, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this bad and guilty over anything else in my entire 20-something years of life.”

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Will using AI in college come back to bite you?

Aside from personal feelings of guilt, will using AI so heavily for college coursework come back to bite these AI natives as they try to enter the workforce?

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It will likely depend on the field they’re planning to go into, as well as the opinions of individual employers. But some employers certainly have noticed issues with hiring AI natives that might dissuade them from doing so.

For example, in May, a New York financier told the Financial Times about the first wave of AI natives he encountered in the form of his summer 2025 interns. He says he found their ideas “alarmingly shallow” and made fewer return offers after their internships than usual.

“We want critical thinking, not just AI,” he said.”

Even Anne Hathaway has experienced this when hiring for a vacancy in her personal team. The actress said that the thank-you notes she got following interviews from the candidates all sounded the same and were clearly written by ChatGPT, much to her disappointment.

Em Norton is a Content Specialist at moneywise.com. They have been with the company since 2022.

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