Why is Gen Z so good with AI?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is something I've always tried to speak about with a large degree of nuance, in no small part due to the Wild West nature of its use. It’s a real struggle to know what’s legitimate information and who’s just grifting with everyone and their brother, throwing around titles like ‘AI expert’ or ‘experienced with generative AI’.

This is because, in my view, having a cursory understanding of the commercially available uses of AI is the bare minimum. Not having a stance at least on generative AI and its use in your industry in 2024 is right up there with folks in the 90s who thought the Internet was a passing trend.

Rather than getting into the weeds on AI itself, in coming weeks I would much rather discuss the culture around AI as it exists both in the workplace and in daily life, as well as the risks inherent to its proliferation. These risks are far more mundane and thus much more likely to occur — and Skynet going live on Judgement Day isn’t what I'm talking about.

Now, for Gen-Z, AI is our frontier. When the boomers finally die off, Millennials slide into their elder statesmen era, and someone from Generation Alpha is making fun of us for not having some AI-based robotic friend that lives in a phone, Gen-Z is going to be saddled with making AI work for us. This means not letting it take someone’s livelihood if it renders their job obsolete, or makes any job too streamlined and efficient, likely filtering away all the nuances of an individual writer's style.

This is the chief risk in my industry. Most traditional news media outlets are going to have dedicated editors for pulling world news of the wires to make it fit for publication, with stylistic and cultural changes to the language to make it more fitting for that outlet’s audience. When it comes to AI’s position in this space, you’re looking down the barrel of the widely held belief that generative AI can do no wrong.

Generative AI language models are the big stakeholder, yet the likes of Chat-GPT, while powerful in its basic form, are only as intelligent as a primary school student and incapable of more complex analysis. Though that in and of itself does not disqualify it from use, it goes to show that every Tom, Dick, or Ahmed with two coins to rub together and an Internet connection could write some half-decent marketing copy that looks like everyone else’s.

That’s the heart of the issue that most don’t understand. Gen-Z, digital natives we may be, have developed a preference for the real world, aiming to disconnect from social media and the Internet and all the very bad news in the world, and reconnect with our friends and family in the ‘real’ world. AI sits as this thing that, like Gen-Z, has been hooked up to the open tailpipe of the Internet from the start, and isn’t being disconnected. In fact, the developers of most chat-based AI have sought only to expand and strengthen its connection to the Internet and the world beyond its developers, training it on increasingly complex queries.

This reaches back to the risks of hyper-advanced technology. The ideal world of AI’s use, in my view, is to get us closer to an internationalist Utopian ideal. Star Trek, Solarpunk, world peace, whatever you want to call it — the robots do the grunt work, humanity focuses on art and philosophy and exploring the stars.