The Gen Z User Manual: Vibes, Emojis, and the End of AI Compliments

Lesson 1: Help form a team identity

May I present to you: the moment I joined Green team.

And then: two minutes after I joined Green team Kermit. 

Fully embracing our newly-appointed mascot, it kind of became all-kermit, all the time.

And it really became our group identity.

Of course, there are other ways to bond with your co-workers. But nothing is quite as strong, or works quite as quick as having an easily-identifiable shared belonging to point to. And once you have that, everything else becomes easier.



Lesson 2: Could you ask… cuter?

Communication is how we as humans relate to one another. But communication is more than just words. We have non-verbal cues, like body language, gestures, and tone of voice. That’s lost online. That’s why, in the early days of the internet, we invented the emoticon :-)



Many decades later, we now have roughly 4,000 emojis that we can use to help express our emotions and intentions.

Having grown up with these emojis, Gen Z kind of expects you to… use them.

One such emoji that’s been severely under-utilised by those born before 1997 is the humble: 🥺

The pleading emoji.



Need someone to do something you were supposed to do?

Lesson 3: No AI compliments

My third and final lesson: Share the love, but stop with the AI compliments.

Let me preface this by saying I think having a shout-out culture is an excellent thing. But a shout-out loses a lot of its heart once you realise it wasn’t actually authored by the person who’s posting it.

How can we tell?

It’s not a fool-proof method, but generally, if your shoutout is more than four lines long and features five different types of punctuation marks? I’m suspicious.

But the true nail in the coffin is bolded keywords.

If I see "demonstrated excellence" in bold font, I know ChatGPT wrote it. Seriously, just post the rough draft. It will mean more to us than a perfectly polished robot paragraph.