A group photo of us Aboitiz Future Leaders (AFL) interns in the SuperDuperCon held at Aboitiz Construction. (From left: Isabelle Cembrano, Ruth Jedidiah Durolfo, and Rafael Siriban)
By Isabelle Myeisha Cembrano, Aboitiz Scholar – UP Baguio
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the tree that keeps on giving, and yet every time you pick from it, it comes collecting for more tokens.
As Gen Z myself, AI is no stranger to me. It has been known to be a sweet, tempting fruit that becomes addicting to anyone who dares indulge themselves. However as the world continues to evolve, technology evolves along with it as well, leaving everyone at the same crossroads: to adapt or to get left behind.
This quandary was the main theme in the SuperDuperCon (SDC) held last July 14, by Aboitiz President and CEO, Sabin Aboitiz, where he discussed the cost of AI and how A-People can create value with it.
Squeezing The Orange
Sabin discussed how AI is an advanced technology tool that still requires traditional human discernment in order to attain its value. He referred to it as another “orange” that we must “squeeze” intelligently before we seek out new ones.
As a social media user, student, and intern in the digital age, grappling with AI is like playing a round of russian roulette— but with oranges. You never know if you’re going to get a poisoned fruit or a perfectly ripe one.
Although if there’s anything I learned from the SDC is that perfect is expensive, and we should not want to go perfect. At the same time, that doesn’t give us a reason to get complacent or leave our AI usage to chance either.
The team members from Aboitiz all have this as their common concern: What happens now?
This is brought by the threat AI brings to everyone as it can cost our creativity, organic human ideas, environmental sustainability, and even jobs. In our reality today, there is an increasing demand in AI use and implementation, which tells us how the need for human judgement is even greater.
To squeeze the orange, we must be conscious users of AI and learn to intelligently prompt to maximize its value. It isn’t bad to embrace the convenience brought by AI, but it is also our responsibility to be self-policing as we adapt to these changes.
Making Orange Juice
That being said, the efficiency of AI is never without the information fed to it by humans. Hence, it is important to integrate a standard procedure to ensure that we adequately balance self-learning along with it.
Here are 5 steps to make orange juice with AI:
- ½ cup of knowing which AI tools to use
- Squeeze as much orange to your liking, but maximize one’s value first
- A heap tablespoon of prompting wisely
- A sprinkle of human judgement
- Serve with accountability and transparency to your team members
However, these steps merely serve as a guide on how to use AI, because at the end of the day it is still our individual agency as humans that make AI-generated content digestible. This is definitely not to say that we are replaceable by AI, but more so that our existing skills are complimentary to it.
In my personal experience as a digital communication intern and journalism student, it has been my greatest challenge today to properly discern AI tools and whether or not it is appropriate to use it at all.
What I learned is it does make our work easier and more efficient. However, the value in the work still remains in the human touch that was put into it and the team who worked behind it.
In the age of AI, our role as humans are more integral than ever because it is now up to us to self-learn in order to maximize it better and limit its costs.
Through smart prompting and greater awareness of the costs of AI, we become conscious users who are well informed about its advantages and disadvantages.
With this shift in perspective, we continue to evolve ourselves along with the modernization of the world, and ultimately transform the threat AI brings into something empowering as we wisely “squeeze” the most out of its value.