I use AI all day, every day. It’s already transformed many aspects of my business. But, the more I use it, the more I realize it still requires a good deal of human intelligence to be used properly.
In fact, when AI makes obvious mistakes, it’s a helpful reminder to be more cautious when the accuracy and thoroughness of other AI output is more complicated.
For instance, I was watching the US Open on Saturday and noticed they kept showing the same woman clapping throughout the broadcast. I didn’t know who she was, so I took a photo and asked Gemini.
It then very confidently told me it was a social media influencer at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
Clearly wrong, I did a Google image search and confirmed it was Ben Shelton’s sister.
In the same match, a buddy asked ChatGPT about Shelton’s serve speed, and it responded with a blatant mathematical error: “158 mph is over 200 mph faster than the average recreational player’s serve.”
It’s usually not this easy to spot AI’s mistakes. It’s much more difficult to discern partial truths or half-baked results.
Often, I’ll get a confident, convincing response that I know from my experience to be missing something critical. After providing the necessary context, I’ll get a completely different answer. Had I just taken it at face value, I would’ve been going full-speed in the wrong direction.
This goes beyond chats as well. As I’ve started to build more websites using AI, I’ve found there’s still a lot of human creativity and technical understanding needed to produce a solid result. Even with detailed prompts, the initial build always requires several rounds of fixes and fine-tuning - a navigation menu that’s too wide for mobile screens, dark text that’s illegible on a dark background, missing meta descriptions, etc.
In these still-early days of AI usage, I see a lot of people who treat results as the answer, especially when they don’t know any better.
Instead, each response should be treated like a rough draft to be carefully evaluated with human intelligence.
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