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06.11.2025 09:58

AI Widening Digital Divide between Generations

Melanie Nyfeler Kommunikation
Universität Zürich

Artificial intelligence is increasingly taking root in everyday life. Most people in Switzerland are worried about AI and the next generation of digital technology, but those who regularly use AI are more sanguine about it. While the youngest spend more time online than they would like to, older people and those with little digital literacy are falling behind, according to the latest data from a representative long-term study being conducted by the University of Zurich.

People in Switzerland spend an average of 5.7 hours per day online in 2025, three times longer than in 2011 (1.84 hours) and two hours longer than before the outbreak of the COVID pandemic in 2019 (3.6 hours). Young adults between the ages of 20 and 29 spend an average of 8.4 hours per day online. “For the first time, the internet has become more important to this age group than person-to-person contacts for information as well as entertainment,” says study lead investigator Michael Latzer, a professor of Media Change and Innovation at the University of Zurich.

Social media like TikTok and Instagram in particular have a formative influence on the everyday lives of young adults (95% of 20- to 29-year-olds use social media) and are increasingly being used also by older people (58% of persons aged 70 and above). Basic digitalization of everyday life is advancing rapidly: two out of three monetary transactions these days are cashless, 39% of products are purchased online, and one-third of all work that is performable remotely gets done working from home.

Almost half of Switzerland regularly uses generative AI

Ever since the launch of ChatGPT on the market in November 2022, the percentage of the population that has already used generative AI has rapidly increased from 37% in 2023 to 54% in 2024 and to 73% in 2025. One-time tryouts of generative AI have since evolved into routine use of the technology: almost half of the people in Switzerland today use generative AI at least once a month (weekly: 21%; daily: 17%), and that figure rises to 84% among 14- to 19-year-olds. “Actual use of AI is substantially more prevalent than that because AI is increasingly being integrated into everyday services like search engines and chatbots,” Latzer explains.

Generative AI is most frequently employed in education and on the job (53%) – two-thirds of 20- to 29-year-olds use it for those purposes. Three out of ten 14- to 19-year-olds admit to using AI to help them create content that they were assigned to compose by themselves. Moreover, for regular users of the technology, AI has become a go-to source of advice for everyday decisions regarding finances (21%) and career development (21%), for example. However, the importance of generative AI and influencers among the broad population is low compared to that ascribed to traditional places to turn to for information or advice: only 7% of the public ascribes importance to information generated by AI for informing political decisions, compared with 27% who rely on conventional internet sources of info for that purpose.

Surveillance, loss of control and job anxiety – AI regulation desired

Despite the high AI utilization rate, skepticism and concerns about potential risks persist. Although a large majority of regular users (71%) are convinced that AI helps them to accomplish tasks more efficiently, only one-third of them believe that AI will improve life on the whole. Six out of ten people in Switzerland fear an increase in surveillance, and one-third of the Swiss public is worried that generative AI will spin out of control or might cause mass unemployment. There is an accordingly strong desire for regulation: half of people in Switzerland urge stricter regulation of generative AI, far outnumbering those calling for greater oversight of the internet in general (36%).

General AI will arrive, with negative consequences

Nearly half of internet users in Switzerland believe that generative AI will evolve into general AI in the near future, becoming an all-purpose application that is superior to humans in almost all areas of life. More than 50% of those people expect that to happen in the next five years. Those who regularly use AI tend to believe in general artificial intelligence. That belief, though, is also accompanied by concerns: 60% of the Swiss public and 49% of AI users say they expect general AI to have mostly adverse impacts on humanity. Confident optimism, in contrast, predominates regarding the internet at large: 60% think it is good for society.

Prevailing skepticism toward cyborg products

The next generation of digital technology combines internet, bio- and nanotechnologies and aims to enhance and extend human capabilities beyond natural biological limitations – through the deployment of cyber products, for example. While Silicon Valley is placing high hopes on futuristic technologies of that kind, the Swiss public remains skeptical: a mere one-fifth of people in Switzerland and only 30% of Swiss AI users believe in this potential. The majority of the public mainly sees risks such as new forms of cybercrime (78%), violations of privacy (67%) and social inequality (64%).

AI fueling divides between young and old

Societal divides regarding digitalization run along age and internet literacy lines and are amplified by AI use. Whereas 91% of 20- to 29-year-olds in Switzerland rate their internet skills as good or excellent, only 59% of people over 70 do. The difference is even wider when it comes to dealing with generative AI: almost half of the 14- to 19-year-old age group, but only 20% of those over 70, feel at ease using it. Those differences are reflected in people’s felt sense of belonging to the information society. Only 34% of the Swiss public feels integrated in the information society, 25 percentage points fewer than in 2015, with a particularly small share among the elderly (19% of the 70+ age group) and the less digitally literate (14%), whereas 20- to 29-year-olds and people with sophisticated internet skills feel much more deeply integrated (54% respectively).

While the elderly and people who do not use AI are getting left behind, younger individuals and AI users are struggling with digital overconsumption. More and more people are spending more time online than they would like to (38% today vs. 24% in 2019). Eighty-two percent of 14- to 19-year-olds and 58% of AI users want to reduce the amount of time they spend on the internet.

World Internet Project Switzerland

The World Internet Project (WIP) is a comparative longitudinal study that records the diffusion and use of the internet in 30 countries in an international comparison and analyzes social, political, and economic implications of the development of the internet.

The Swiss WIP project has been carried out since 2011 by the Media Change & Innovation Division in the Department of Communication and Media Research (IKMZ) at the University of Zurich under the leadership of Michael Latzer. This year’s results are based on a representative online survey of 1,078 internet users aged 14 and over and was carried out by gfs.bern between June and August 2025. The 2025 project team members include Noemi Festic, Céline Odermatt and Alena Birrer.

All topic reports are available for download on http://mediachange.ch/research/wip-ch-2025

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Wissenschaftliche Ansprechpartner:

Contact:
Prof. Michael Latzer
Department of Communication and Media Research
Media Change & Innovation Division
University of Zurich
Tel. +41 76 3981099
E-mail: m.latzer@ikmz.uzh.ch
www.mediachange.ch

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Originalpublikation:

http://mediachange.ch/research/wip-ch-2025

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Weitere Informationen:

https://www.news.uzh.ch/en/articles/media/2025/WIP.html

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Merkmale dieser Pressemitteilung:
Journalisten
Gesellschaft, Informationstechnik, Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften, Pädagogik / Bildung, Psychologie
überregional
Forschungs- / Wissenstransfer, Forschungsergebnisse
Englisch

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