(FA) AI and the Trust Revolution–How Technology Is Transforming Human Connections

When experts worry about young people’s relationship with information online, they typically assume that young people are not as media literate as their elders. But ethnographic research conducted by Jigsaw—Google’s technology incubator—reveals a more complex and subtle reality: members of Gen Z, typically understood to be people born after 1997 and before 2012, have developed distinctly different strategies for evaluating information online, ones that would bewilder anyone over 30. They do not consume news as their elders would—namely, byfirst reading a headline and then the story. They do typically read the headlines first, but then they jump to the online comments associated with the article, and only afterward delve into the body of the news story. That peculiar tendency is revealing. Young people do not trust that a story is credible simply because an expert, editorial gatekeeper, or other authority figure endorses it; they prefer to consult a crowd of peers to assess its trustworthiness. Even as young people mistrust institutions and figures of authority, the era of the social web allows them to repose their trust in the anonymous crowd.

A subsequent Jigsaw study in the summer of 2023, following the release of the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT, explored how members of Gen Z in India and the United States use AI chatbots. The study found that young people were quick to consult the chatbots for medical advice, relationship counseling, and stock tips, since they thought that AI was easy to access, would not judge them, and was responsive to their personal needs—and that, in many of these respects, AI advice was better than advice they received from humans. In another study, the consulting firm Oliver Wyman found a similar pattern: as many as 39 percent of Gen Z employees around the world would prefer to have an AI colleague or manager instead of a human one; for Gen Z workers in the United States, that figure is 36 percent. A quarter of all employees in the United States feel the same way, suggesting that these attitudes are not only the province of the young.

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“Increasing human agency should be the goal when thinking about how people interact with AI platforms. Instead of viewing AI as a robotic overlord, developers need to present it more as a superintelligent member of people’s existing online crowds.”https://t.co/87ts23IiTD

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) July 7, 2025