THE first time I had used ChatGPT was in 2023. I was racing to finish an English essay and thought about taking help from artificial intelligence (AI). I asked it for a quote on solitude in literature. It gave me a poetic line with a citation and everything.

I was impressed, but then I looked it up. The author did not exist. The book did not exist. The quote was beautifully written, but completely made up. Today, the AI tendency to fabricate facts with confidence has only gained momentum.

Despite all the buzz around AI, we are still a long way from building something that can actually think. And despite how fast AI is advancing, it still cannot replace the one thing that makes us human: our brains.

There is a growing fear that AI will soon outthink us, outwork us, maybe even control us. But, according to experts, like futurist Bernard Marr, and, frankly, my own day-to-day exposure of AI tools, such fears are overblown … at least for now. Yes, AI can do some incredible things. It can generate text, create images, help write code, and automate tasks that once took hours. But that does not make it conscious. What AI does best is prediction, not understanding. It sees patterns in data and calculates what is likely to come next. It does not ‘know’ anything; it just mimics knowing.

That is why, when I recently asked an AI model, “Who is the CEO of Twitter?” it confidently answered, “Elon Musk.” The truth? Linda Yaccarino had taken that role, and had just resigned. There was no replacement at the time. But the AI was not lying; it was doing what it was trained to do: guess based on patterns. Elon Musk was CEO before, so it assumed he still was.

This is one of the most misunderstood things about AI. It does not have a mind. It does not understand context. It does not live in the real world, touch hot pans, make mistakes, or feel the consequences. That is why AI still struggles with what we take for granted: common sense.

Some people worry about the rise of artificial general intelligence (AGI), the point where machines will supposedly think like humans. But most researchers agree that AGI is still theoretical and likely decades away, if at all.

AI, as things currently stand, cannot reason flexibly, cannot navigate ambiguity well, and cannot reflect on its own thinking. In short, it lacks the very things that make us human. This does not mean AI is harmless. It can be biased, misused and dangerously convincing when it is wrong. It can automate decisions without understanding consequences, or generate misinformation with ease. That is why human oversight, regulation and ethics are more important than ever.

AI still needs us, the humans. It can speed up our work, but it cannot replace the insight, judgment, or emotional intelligence that we bring to the table. It is not humans versus AI; it is humans with AI. The people who learn to use it wisely will go further and farther than those who fear it or ignore it.

So, no, AI is simply not replacing us, it is teaming up with us. Think of it as the Google Maps to your road trip. It might help you get there faster, but you are still the one deciding where to go and how. And in a world moving this fast, that is the only kind of partnership we need: smart tools guided by even smarter people.

Khadija Nadeem
Pennsylvania, US

Published in Dawn, July 24th, 2025