I Know Everyone's Obsessed With AI; Here's When It's NOT Useful

Unless you’ve been living in the woods, deep inside a cave and under a rock, you’ve been hearing A LOT about AI.

Is AI going to take our jobs? When should we be using AI and when are good ol’ fashioned humans better? When should we do a “first draft” with AI and then bring in people to feng shui it?

As someone who’s been working in tech for 10+ years and helped hundreds of clients launch their tech products, here are my thoughts about AI.

What’s the best way to use AI in software development?

AI is great for web scraping and structuring unstructured data; it can identify patterns and organize information consistently.

Particularly if you’re gathering data in many different formats, from many different sources, AI can identify which data goes where and structure it accordingly. No matter what the platform looks like, where the data came from, it’ll work for your application.

When should you use humans?

The truth about AI is that it gets things mostly right, most of the time. But there are many situations where 95% accuracy isn’t good enough! 

When it comes to things like financial data, health data, or even shipping calculations, AI models do this adequately. But in these types of situations “adequate” simply isn’t good enough. 

For example, I wouldn’t want AI to be in charge of sending ACH payments on its own with a 95% confidence window. What if it accidentally calculated how much money I should send someone because it misread an invoice?

Even when using words, AI can experience what we call “hallucinations”. AI never says “I don’t know.” 

It's great at answering questions about the things it was trained on, but if it lacks some information it will simply make things up. 

It’s bad enough when AI gives you an obviously absurd reply, but it is worse when the reply makes sense but part of it is wrong.

This is why you should never, ever forget to verify. 

In situations where we want 100% accuracy, it’s incredibly important to have real, live humans with decades of experience and insights into the nuance of business and coding to double check things. (That’s why we pair our super senior engineers with AI tools when we run our NeuCheck code audits.)

When should you use AI?

If you need 100% accuracy, which is most of the time the case, or if a project requires nuanced analysis or creative thinking or any type of math - you’ll want to pair any AI you use with humans.

AI is a good assistant and a time saver, but they can’t replace actual human intelligence - and that is a good thing!

AI is changing every day - you can read the whole article I write about it here.

But right now, the smartest thing you can do is consider using AI on a case-by-case basis. You can view it as a source for a really solid “first draft,” knowing that you’ll probably need a talented, experienced human to go in and interpret, double check, and tweak whatever AI has provided.

Interested in seeing how AI tools + super senior engineers can work together to make your code and site better? Grab a spot on my calendar and let’s chat!