I joined Reddit??!!


(a whole lot of garbage in this graphic!)


Never wanted to join Reddit before.  I created my account and read through an interesting discussion in that community about whether or not AI will just dispense with all the IDers out there.  And there seems to be a strong consensus that upper management, without much understanding of the work of IDers, as well as not much respect for what they do, and in an effort to increase profits, AI will be thought of as a way to reduce staff, especially Instructional Designers.  There is also a pretty strong consensus that even if the instructional design workforce gets downsized, AI can't really ever replace the work of good instructional designers.  And right now, the AI needs someone good to ask it questions, create the gem, and spin the proverbial plate.  

There is no question that upper, upper management sees AI as a way to cut labor costs in several knowledge-based industries.  Lots of layouts as of late.  But how soon do we think we'll get to a place where the AI can run the AI, and evaluate its output?  I've done long queries with AI on particular topics, and the output is pretty good--especially when I'm asking for specific information, or references to refereed journal articles.  I've asked AI to evaluate itself based on the information it returned in response to my questions.  And it did that okay, too.  But someone has to ask it to do its job and evaluate its responses.  That is clearly a human-centered job.  

At the edtech I used to work at, we wanted to personalize student learning more effectively and thought one way might be to customize examples to specific student majors and career goals.  We ran an experiment asking AI to create this content, and it did it VERY badly.  It was racist, it presented content so superficially as to be inaccurate, and it didn't really do what we wanted--make content more personal and engaging to the student.  I think we all reviewed 30 query responses, and I'm not sure any of them weren't problematic.  And who knows, the problem could have been with the human-created query/gem used to create the content vs. the AI's work product, or both.  But there is clearly a human in the loop needed.

There was also a consensus that if you are an instructional designer, you'd better get good at using AI to do your job more effectively and efficiently.  And if you don't do that, you will be the first to go in a layoff.  Leveraging AI tools for that purpose seems like a skill set that an instructional designer will need long into the future.  

There were lots of ways that we were using AI to automate certain types of content creation.  Development of Alt text was one of them.  There are several copyediting tools and translation tools that, while still needing a human to review, do a really great first pass at very time-intensive jobs.    

What I came away with from that discussion thread is that Instructional Designers bring a solid skill set around learning methodologies that AI doesn't yet offer, at least not without a human to drive the development.  And maybe that is where we need to leverage our skill set alongside AI.  

A lot of this discussion reminded me of conversations I used to have around my job as an acquisition editor (which always got confused for a line editor).  I remember sitting next to a guy on an airplane where he told me, no doubt, I'd be out of a job toute suite, because anything he ever wanted to learn/know was all there on the internet for him to find.  And sure, it is.  But how many of those 1,000,000+ search results do you really want to have to engage with to ensure you get accurate information?  The internet is like drinking through the information fire hose.  I do think that courses that need basic information/facts will end up being "short courses" or will be built in such a way that you learn the basics from AI then bring that knowledge to class.  For instance, I met a professor teaching Intermediate Macroeconomics recently who dropped her course materials and instead drafted a series of queries that students could use to learn about key concepts.  

It was an interesting discussion from people out in the field doing the job now, so I appreciated the insights.  What I came away with, from so many posts is the old "garbage in, garbage out" statement, and I think that is an important consideration with AI.  If you're not good at asking it to do something, the result are a direct reflection of that.    

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