“Gen Z” (Generation Zoomer), a term borrowed from the practice of using zoom, refers to people born between 1997 and 2012. This generation saw the massive expansion of the Internet, a gigantic information warehouse, and the dizzying rise and global spread of different social media platforms. Their period of growing up also included the Great Recession (late 2007–mid-2009) and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Popular opinion about Gen Zs is that they are more inclined to thinking very highly of themselves, more rebellious to traditional norms, more prone to peer pressure and herd mentality, and more at risk of mental health issues arising from social media use. These factors affect how Gen Zs participate in activities in the Catholic Church and their understanding of the Catholic faith. African Catholic youth will benefit from doing a critical review of their attitudes in this respect. By undertaking a methodical look at the phenomenon of artificial intelligence and use of social media by young people, the benefits and drawbacks will be highlighted and a recommendation made about responsible use in ways that promote the Catholic faith and protect the society.
While Six Degrees (launched in 1997) is considered the oldest social media platform, popular platforms like TikTok, Facebook, X, WhatsApp, Weibo, Instagram, and YouTube anchor a significant percentage of the lives of Gen Zs because social media enables them to view others and to share their own viewpoints, experiences and activities. Granted that critical opinions against the Catholic faith can be spread on social media in this way, the Catholic faith can be effectively disseminated across social media by Gen Zs who find meaning in doing so. A recent model is the “millennial” 15-year-old, Carlo Acutis (1991-2006), nicknamed “God’s Influencer,” who was canonized by Pope Leo XIV on Sunday, 7 September 2025, for creatively devoting digital resources to promoting reverence for the Holy Eucharist.
Some Gen Zs live in bubbles and are unwilling to step up because of the pain involved. Some align with ideas and social movements that make society worse. Gen Z mannerisms include those who fancy themselves on top of the world once they can pad their ears with expensive earphones and those who are focused on achieving things that make them stand out. Many Gen Zs also show a pattern of quickly rushing to artificial intelligence chatbots (ChatGPT, Grok, Siri, Alexa, Gemini, etc.) at the least threat of engaging their human intelligence (HI) in academic writing.
A literature student uses AI to write a poem or a birthday greeting of four sentences rather than his heart and brain and some ask, “And what’s the problem with that?” An opinion on how “Lecturers are struggling with students’ use of AI,” which was published online by The Guardian on Monday, 9 June 2025, pointed out how students can use AI to cheat, but “some of these students don’t realize that it’s cheating…. There is now the bizarre reality that work can be written by AI and marked by AI – a truly hellish scenario for the human intellect.” African Catholic students should be ethically guided in the use of AI. This principle also applies to everyone, as it is about ensuring that society is on the right track. Unethical use of AI predictably leads to a range of socially-disruptive conditions and maladaptive behaviours.
Artificial intelligence was developed by human intelligence, and it has come to stay. One of the core messages of Pope Leo XIV at the Second Annual Rome Conference on AI, Ethics, and Corporate Governance in June 2025 was that artificial intelligence has plenty to offer in areas like communication, education, transportation, medicine, climate, and space but it must be used in a responsible way. Attention must also be drawn to a four-paragraph letter entitled, “Research Priorities for a Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence: Open Letter,” which was signed and published in January 2015 by Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and a number of leading AI experts. They lauded the wide innovative possibilities brought by AI but warned that research in AI must be properly controlled by governments and organizations. If society fails in this, AI would pose an existential threat to humanity and there may be people willing to bring the world to Ground Zero if given the chance. Ten years after the open letter, Elon Musk in 2025 touted the coming of an advanced form of artificial intelligence vastly more intelligent than human beings. Should we be scared? People now live with a foreboding that humanity might gradually become subservient to advanced forms of AI. However, the Catholic faith emphasizes that human beings are the apex of creation because they are the image of God and entrusted with the care of creation. Whatever right or wrong choices
Some Gen Z students, parents, and teachers believe that relying on AI, even for minor class assignments, is a good way to avoid brain strain and that it frees students to devote time and energy to other things. Their mantra is, “work smart, not hard.” However, this state of affairs also indicates a crisis of human intelligence. The incline of artificial intelligence (AI) should not be the decline of human intelligence (HI). In other words, advancements in AI and the increased use of AI should not generate regression in HI. Many Gen Zs can quickly memorize songs released by celebrities but cannot memorize five equations or the major details of a historical event and easily claim brain stress for normal exercise of human agency and brain function. Any teacher, parent, or citizen raising strong objections to students liberally using AI chatbots for routine schoolwork is defending the future of human intelligence. An ethical approach to the use of AI is one of the social values African youth should promote in a world on the verge of surrendering to AI.
The “Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence,” which was co-issued in January 2025 by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education highlights the immense technological and social possibilities offered by artificial intelligence as well as the existential threat AI poses to humanity. This is also about maintaining, rather than blurring, the distinction between using prompts to get AI to write class assignments, browsing for different research materials online, and then using human intelligence to sift out relevant points and generate a written work.
Undue reliance on artificial intelligence is also associated with broader psycho-social frameworks that pride on “the end justifies the means” and shortcuts to success through criminal or indecent activities. Such dysfunctional activities happen to be among online content that rake in a high number of views, likes, and shares when posted on social media. It would be understandable to Catholic students that over-reliance on AI constricts the potential of the human brain.
A human being can become cognitively impaired from insufficient use of the human brain. The human brain is a wonder in its biological constitution and memory capacity (estimated at 2.5 petabytes or 2.5 million gigabytes). This is a phenomenon African Catholic students understand from a divine creation point of view. If Gen Zs continuously delegate their human thinking to AI chatbots, their human creative potential will proportionally decline. This cognitive decline may not be immediately measurable but its impacts would be unmistakably felt over time. As a cognitively impaired generation gives birth to a successor generation, a cumulative outcome in cognitive decline will also take place. In an interview published on 13 September 2025 by Russia Today News, Dr. Mathew Maavak, an expert on AI, said that the people who benefit the most from generative AI are paradoxically those educated before the massive Internet era because they could “read books and journals, scrounge for information, and cultivate a regimen for inquiry…. It is easy to blame AI for ‘dumbing down’ society, but in truth, society was already hopelessly dumbed down…. AI is not the cause of this decline; it is merely an accelerant…. Worse, the herd is dumbing down AI itself. Generative AI thrives on feedback loops. If each cycle grows dumber, what happens to AI in the long run?” There is also a rising concern about how AI is disrupting the global order and human relationships as people seek AIs for companionship.
In the Global South, deeply entrenched structures of political domination, economic exploitation, and religious oppression at national and international levels have predisposed many African Generation Zoomers to have minor interest in social matters. Many of them mentally dissociate themselves from the capacity to step forward and cause the changes they want. Many psychologically escape by becoming fans of the entertainment world, parties, and even anti-social behaviours like drug abuse, indecencies and projection of pseudo-selves on social media. Social media frequently pulls them into its alternate world, where it floods their mental spaces with posts pushed out by curated algorithms that also serve the Global North’s geopolitical purposes. In his papal messages for the World Day of Peace in 2024 and 2025, Pope Francis had pointed out that artificial intelligence and technology in general are products of human creativity and must be used in ways that promote human dignity, peace, unity and general well-being for everyone.
In conclusion, in Generation Zoomers, humanity is acquainted with the benefits of artificial intelligence but also faces a crisis of human intelligence due to erosion by artificial intelligence. The Catholic faith teaches that technology comes from human creativity but must be used ethically. The erosion of the human space by AI chatbots and social media beyond safe limits negatively impacts the quality of human reasoning, human relationships, and social productivity.
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