How AI Could Make Learning Worse (if we aren’t careful)

AI can be a wonderful tool when used thoughtfully. However, sometimes the ease of using AI can lead people to pass their tasks on to an AI tool without thinking, analyzing, or planning ahead of time. This can lead to mediocre results.

Imagine if AI was a factory and you asked to to produce “something” for you. AI may select a common thing - maybe a rock - and produce it over and over with slightly different sizes and shapes.

Because AI produces content quickly and easily, you could end up with a lot of gray rocks. But producing a lot of common and mediocre things is probably not going to move the needle in your organization.

What does this mean in the world of learning and development? Although we have the ability to plug in a topic and create an e-learning file (or if we don’t yet - we will soon!), it is extremely important that we make some decisions before making that move. We do not want e-learning that looks like this:

Tempting as it may be, putting a topic into an AI tool and using what it spits out is not going to help people learn. Think about the last time you came across content that was obviously AI. How did you feel? Lots of people want to produce AI text, but very few want to read it.

Why is that? AI content:

• Can be vague

• Can be obvious

• Lacks personality

• May not be relevant or specific to the learner’s role or goals

We know from research that adult learners want to be respected for what they already know. They approach learning in a problem-focused way. And they want to use what they are learning in the real world.

Can AI tools be used to help design and develop e-learning with these needs in mind? Absolutely! But it won’t be a quick, automatic process. So absolutely use AI tools in your instructional design work, but do so thoughtfully - or risk creating some gray rocks yourself.