Last month in Hong Kong, Erin and I went to catch the hydrofoil to Macau. I'd asked AI for directions, and it told me which ferry port to go to. Sounded completely sure of itself. I bought tickets. We showed up an hour early, feeling relaxed.
Until the people there told us we were at the wrong port.
I checked the tickets on my phone — they said something different than the AI had. We threw ourselves into a taxi, rode twelve white-knuckle minutes across town, and made the boat with ten minutes to spare.
Here's the lesson: the AI didn't lie on purpose. It doesn't have purposes. It gave me a confident, well-organized, completely wrong answer — because confidence is what these tools do, whether or not they're right.
There's a word for this: "hallucination." It used to show up as goofy images — people with six fingers. Now it hides inside helpful-sounding directions, summaries, and facts. And it happens more than the companies admit.
Should you be afraid of AI? Not at all. Just use it like a brilliant, fast assistant who occasionally gets things wrong: gratefully, and with your eyes open.
The whole discipline fits on a napkin:
Let AI do the heavy lifting — drafting, summarizing, organizing, the first pass. That's where it shines. But when something actually matters (a date, an address, a dollar figure, a medical detail, the ferry port), check it yourself. Ten seconds beats an hour of panic.
That's the rule. AI gives you answers. You keep the judgment.