The importance of the human factor with AI tools

Source Domain: www.telefonica.com

There is something you only truly understand after spending many hours working with all these tools: no artificial intelligence can yet replace the judgement of someone who has already built up professional experience, made real mistakes, and knows how to distinguish between a superficial solution and a valid one.

I say this based on daily practice, not theory. I use various AIs on a regular basis, personally paying for several of them to truly understand their strengths, limitations and biases. And the more I use them, the clearer one conclusion becomes: today, AI speeds things up enormously, but it also requires us to be more vigilant.

Just this weekend, for example, I spent many hours building a website with the help of various artificial intelligences. The initial impression was promising: speed, apparent reliability, immediate responses, convincing code. But as the work progressed, something very familiar to those of us who have spent years solving complex problems emerged: AI often thinks it knows more than it actually does.

It makes authoritative suggestions even when it is wrong. It fixes one part and breaks another. It strings together solutions that seem coherent but do not always grasp the problem as a whole. In the end, I ended up dismantling much of what had been generated and returning to a more traditional, more manual, slower, but also more reliable approach.

And that experience sums up quite well where we stand today.

Artificial intelligence does not replace the senior professional; in fact, it empowers them. Because those who already possess sound judgement know when to accept a proposal, when to reject it, and when to detect that behind a seemingly brilliant answer lies an incomplete understanding. That is probably why the best current definition is not to think of AI as a substitute, but as an amplifier: it empowers the senior professional, but still requires human hands at the helm.

Added to this is an aspect that is often underestimated:…

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