AI: Has The Student Become The Teacher?
ChatGPT has as many people scared as it does excited. Popular culture has many of us believe that the development of AI is akin to bringing dinosaurs back to life and that humanity’s desire for progress will eventually be its downfall.
The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey and more recently Ex Machina, all depict an AI that goes rogue and turns on its human creators in a fantastically violent fashion. As is often the case, the reality is far less cinematic.
The World Economic Forum, WEF, has predicted that more work tasks will be handled by machines in a “robot revolution,” leaving many people out of work. This brings about the problem of millions of workers needing to be reskilled, and I want to question whether the root of this trouble also holds the solution.
The State Of Play
In the ever-changing landscape of business, the need for high-level digital skills is set to increase by 55%. Learning and development need to be at the forefront of every business to meet these growing needs.
One study shows that a company with a 10,000-plus strong workforce can spend over 100 hours training each employee. Ineffective training can cost up to $13.5 million per 1,000 employees per annum.
Simply put, it’s unsustainable and unprepared for the future. A serious revamp is needed. Industry leader Josh Bersin believes AI has a bigger part to play.
Could AI Be The Future Of L&D?
Bersin believes that the prospect of ChatGPT and AI presents “enormous opportunities.” He points to an AI that he has seen create educational content such as quizzes and course outlines, content which “typically takes a lot of cognitive effort.” ChatGPT has been used to do the same, creating a three-hour course complete with a test in just 10 hours.
AI, when applied like this, could save an untold amount of time and money when training and reskilling employees and completely change L&D as we know it. That is, if the content it generates is factual.
The Tortoise And The Hare
Slow and steady wins the race, right? The speed of ChatGPT is undeniable. It’s the proverbial hare in this story. But a course filled with misinformation is useless compared to a more traditional method, whether it’s made in 10 hours or 10 minutes.
How do we know if an AI-generated course is factual or not?
The truth is, we don’t.
Even on the ChatBot’s prompt page, there is a warning that it “may occasionally generate incorrect information.” Professor Michael Wooldridge, director of foundational AI research at the Alan Turing Institute in London, says ChatGPT “doesn’t know what’s true or false” and that fact-checking is necessary to use it.
“If you ask it for a recipe for an omelet, it’ll probably do a good job, but that doesn’t mean it knows what an omelet is.” ChatGPT, and AI in general, is very much a work in progress and probably not quite ready to step into the shoes of more traditional learning methods yet.
‘Don’t Believe Everything You See On The Internet’
We’ve all heard that famous phrase, right? ChatGPT was raised on the internet. Everything it “knows” is sourced from it. But, as discussed above, it doesn’t know the difference between true and false. Bersin believes this to be the reason for AI’s shortcomings.
Luckily, it presents an obstacle that he believes can be overcome fairly easily. What ChatGPT represents is software that can regurgitate and formulate information at incredible speeds, and so long as your source is legitimate, what it produces will be.
Bersin says “If you focus the AI on a trusted domain of content (most companies have oodles of this), it can solve the ‘expertise delivery’ problem at scale.” This type of AI would have “hundreds of applications in business” and revolutionize the way we train.
C-3PO Or Skynet?
It’s plain to see the humongous impact AI will have on not just the business world. But the mystery of whether the impact will be good or bad remains. Will it be a helpful source of information—a C-3PO to humanity’s Luke Skywalker—or will our creation turn on us?
Whichever it is, there’s no doubt that AI could become a huge feature of learning and development. Chatbots like ChatGPT are only going to become more sophisticated, and it’s already at a very impressive level.
AI can help L&D specialists to create engaging content. In the future, it could assist them in creating content in different languages. This would be welcomed by enterprise businesses where that require consistency across the globe. Furthermore, I can see AI assisting L&D specialists in creating engaging graphics and taking out the creative headache. As many know, when you combine graphics with written content, you can create a winning formula for engaging content.
If we embrace the new technology, L&D can reach a scale of efficiency the likes of which we have never seen before. There is still progress to be made, but I’m not sure if we’re quite ready to ditch the old ways just yet!
