AI can't replace testers, but not for the reasons you think

Every few months someone publishes a blog post claiming AI has made QA engineers obsolete. The argument usually goes like this: AI can generate test cases, AI can run them faster than a human, AI can find patterns in logs, therefore why are you still paying people to click buttons? I work at a company that builds AI testing tools. We sell them. We use them daily. And I'm going to tell you, honestly, that the argument for keeping humans in QA has almost nothing to do with the reasons people usually give. It's not about "human intuition" or "the human touch" or whatever vague phrase gets dropped into these discussions to make testers feel better. The real gap is simpler and harder to fix: AI cannot decide what to test. It can only test what you already told it about. The green build that shipped broken I watched a developer wire Playwright up to an MCP server last year. The idea was solid. Record user flows, generate assertions automatically, let the AI maintain the selectors when the DO