A colleague recently showed me two photos on his phone. One was a selfie with a celebrity. The other was created entirely by artificial intelligence (AI).
“Which one is real?” he asked.
I looked carefully.
The lighting was convincing. The reflections looked natural. Even the expressions on people’s faces felt authentic.
I hesitated. Not because I couldn’t tell, but because I wasn’t sure I could.
That’s when it occurred to me: For most of my life, the challenge was finding information. Today, it’s deciding what to believe.
AI has made that shift impossible to ignore.
It can write, summarize, translate, analyze, and create images in seconds. Much of it is impressive. Much of it is genuinely useful.
But AI hasn’t simply changed how content is created. It has changed what trust requires.
Not long ago, seeing was believing. Today, seeing is only the beginning.
Professionals use AI at work. Students use it to study. Families use it to settle everyday questions.
None of that concerns me. What matters is what happens next.
Do we pause? Do we check another source? Do we ask a better question?
Or do we accept the first answer simply because it arrived quickly and sounded convincing?
That may be one of the defining habits of our time.
Not prompting. Not coding.
Judgment.
Knowing that confidence is not the same as accuracy.
That context still matters. That experience still counts.
This is as true for leaders as it is for everyone else.
Leadership has never been about having all the answers. It has always been about asking better questions and making sounder decisions.
The same lesson applies beyond the workplace.
We should absolutely learn how to use AI. It will soon become as ordinary as a search engine.
But I hope we also learn something else.
To question. To verify. To pause before sharing.
Those habits may prove more valuable than any prompt we will ever write.
I eventually learned which of the two photos was real. Oddly enough, that wasn’t what stayed with me.
What stayed with me was the hesitation.
For years, we were taught not to believe everything we heard.
The age of AI is teaching us not to believe everything we see.
I think the real skill in the age of AI isn’t getting to an answer more quickly.
It’s knowing when not to trust the first one.
The author is vice president and head of corporate communications at SM Investments Corporation, the parent company of the SM Group. A father and advocate for sustainable and inclusive development, he writes the iTHINK column, which explores how technology and leadership shape the trust that enables long-term success.
