Keeping the I in AI
Back in the 1940s Alan Turing and his colleagues in Bletchley Park developed a machine to help them decipher messages encrypted by the Enigma machines. This is credited with the birth of Artificial Intelligence and was followed within ten years by the Turing Test, previously called the imitation game, where an evaluator had to differentiate responses to questions created by computers from those created by humans.
Eighty years later and it is almost impossible to discuss innovation in Learning and Development without the mention or inclusion of AI, regardless of how tenuous the link is. It is also being used by colleagues and peers to speed up the design process, and I have personally been provided with course outlines and content generated by chatpgt in order to “speed up the course development process.”
It is important to remember though, that Turing’s invention, The Bombe, relied on two key aspects; that the information fed into the process was worthy of being de-coded from the thousands of intercepted messages and once decoded, the message produced was done so in a timely manner and provided to the people who could best make use of it.
This is the approach that I and my fellow learning professionals need to replicate. Seeking and analysing data that is available by working with our customers and learners, defining what people need to know, to do and to be, so we are clear what will actually make a difference, and then, and only then, do we feed our requirements into the machine to help us get the correct content in a time and cost effective way, using AI. Then, with what is created, we make sure it is received by the people who can use it, in a way they can digest it, to make the required difference. We can then measure it’s success.
Go ahead and prompt chatgpt or any other AI software for content, “create me a communications skills course”, and you will get content to add to the ever growing pile of off-the-shelf, generic content that already exists today (and based on feedback, is largely disliked by those who engage in it).
Or be clear what you need people to learn, and use Novella, which will use and keep the facts you give it, but create an e-learning module that will not only adhere to learning design theory, but will also customise the course to your how your business operates and the roles within it, telling a story to make the facts 22 times more memorable. A truly custom-made course that will feel like it was written by an internal course designer.
A custom-made course that will be ready within ten minutes of you feeding it the information, giving more time for you to get closer to the people you are responsible to develop and offer a more insightful, informed, strategic and value-added learning approach to your organisation.
You are the Intelligence that we need to get the best from AI, so please, keep the I in AI. Otherwise we will let AI create even more out-of-context, generic, boring and unrelatable e-learning and wonder why we struggle to be seen as influential or strategic.