Is Social Media Distracting Gen Z From the Real AI Security Crisis by Lauren Mauro
Gen Z’s concerns about sustainability and ethics around Artificial Intelligence are justified. But our silence on cybersecurity isn’t.
I scroll past another TikTok about how AI is “ruining everything!” The comments are predictably catastrophic: artists losing jobs, humanity’s demise, the usual. I keep scrolling. Five videos later, an AI-generated meme makes me laugh. Of course, the comments are pure outrage: “Stop normalising AI!”
Annnddd the dopamine hit is gone, just as fast as it came. Have I committed some cardinal sin by enjoying something created by artificial intelligence? According to my feed, apparently so.
Gen Z’s perception of AI has been completely warped by the very algorithms we claim to understand. We’ve reduced an enormously complex technology to a moral dichotomy – AI bad, humans good. The concerns about the environment, the ethical concerns around creative labour and the questions about job displacement are real and deserve our attention. But we’ve developed tunnel vision, fixating on the same few talking points that TikTok force-feeds us whilst we miss equally urgent threats unfolding in real time.
So what’s happening beyond our narrowed field of view? Your mum received a grammatically perfect phishing email that AI crafted specifically for her role, referencing specific projects scraped from the company’s Linkedin. Your grandmother just got a phone call from “you,” a voice cloned from your Instagram stories, claiming you’re in trouble and need money urgently. Your dad attended a Teams meeting where his CEO’s face and voice were synthesised to authorise a fraudulent transfer.
Sadly, these aren’t hypothetical scenarios. In 2024, a Hong Kong company lost $25 million after an employee attended a video call with deepfaked senior leadership. Voice phishing attacks have surged 442%, with deepfake fraud attempts increasing by 3,000% year-on-year. Reality Defender bypassed OpenAI’s Sora safeguards within 24 hours using publicly available tools that, in their CEO’s words, “any smart 10th grader” could access.
Gen Z’s concerns about environmental sustainability, creative labour rights, and employment security are foundational issues that will shape how this technology develops. We are absolutely right to demand accountability from tech companies, advocate for artist protections, and push for sustainable development practices. These challenges require serious policy responses and collective action.
But whilst we complain about the select few issues that fit in a TikTok-style wrapper, I see little conversation from Gen Z about the fact that we can no longer trust what we see, hear, or read online. We’re more concerned about whether using ChatGPT is “cheating” instead of developing verification processes for a world where authentication fundamentally cannot rely on voice, face, or even video confirmation.
We aren’t protecting our parents, grandparents and younger siblings, who are being targeted by the very threats we’re not even discussing. We didn’t teach them to look for spelling errors in phishing emails because AI fixed that. We didn’t warn them that video calls can be faked because we were too busy posting about AI use being cheating. We’re so focused on the future that we’ve missed the present danger.
The younger generations should absolutely be advocating for sustainable AI development, ethical considerations, and worker protections. But we can’t let this advocacy create tunnel vision.
The solution isn’t to outright reject AI, like a lot of my peers are currently doing. We need to learn to verify what we see and hear before trusting it. We need to protect the people we care about from the attacks that are already happening. Unlike previous generations, we don’t get to retire before these problems become insurmountable. We’re the ones who’ll be navigating this for the next 50 years, and the foundations we build now, or moreso, fail to build, will define the future.
Right now, attackers are refining their tools, and our parents are answering phone calls from voices that sound exactly like us.
So Generation Z, let’s advocate for sustainable AI and artist protections, but also teach our loved ones what a deepfake sounds like, because both matter and both are urgent.
We’re right to be concerned about AI. We’re just not concerned about all of it.
