What matters to me today is: AI, Gen Z, the Pope, and You & Me.
This past semester, I completely changed how I grade my undergraduate Business Law course. For years, student papers written outside class heavily influenced final grades. By semester’s end, however, it became unmistakably clear that many submissions were no longer the students’ own work. They were either flawless enough for Supreme Court briefing—or hallucination-ridden chaos (practice tip: proofread, people, PROOFREAD!)
Ironically, Axios recently reported that no generation fears AI more than Gen Z itself. The very students contemporaneously poised to harness AI’s promise increasingly fear it will eliminate the entry-level careers they worked so hard to pursue.
Enter Pope Leo XIV. In his first encyclical, the first American Pope did not condemn technology itself, but warned that AI will ultimately reflect only the ethics and morality (or absence thereof) of those who control and deploy it. He further cautioned that AI risks disproportionately empowering those already possessing power, data, and access.
Questions about AI’s ultimate and potentially existential global consequences may be beyond most of our pay grades, certainly mine. But whether we surrender our own intellect and identity to it remains entirely within our control.
I ended the semester by asking my students: Will you surrender your uniquely individual, God-bestowed identity to an admittedly artificial claim to intellect?
Had AI existed in the late 1500s in England, would we still be blessed with the humanity defining works of Shakespeare?
The truth is simple: AI could not create you. Do not accept for a second that it can replace you.
That’s what matters to me today in 250 words or less. What matters to you? I’d really like to know.