This week there was a conversation in a community for facilitators about what to do when people use AI in learning tasks during online training workshops. I haven’t had that experience myself, or not that I’m aware of, but it’s got me thinking about the bigger picture of AI and how we use it well.
As a trainer and facilitator, when I set a task in a session, it’s so the attendees learn something. My learning design mixes theory and models, stories and problem solving, to help people figure out answers for themselves. That’s how learning embeds.
If we ask AI to do the thinking for us, we risk dumbing ourselves down. We might save time, we might feel pleased with how cleverly we got AI to produce the answer, but we’re not learning what we’re there to learn. And AI hallucinates. Unless we already have a working understanding of the topic, we’re in danger of taking made-up answers as correct, because we don’t know how to spot the difference.
There are real benefits to using AI: increased productivity, taking repetitive tasks off our plate, and working with it as a thinking partner. The problem is using it to shortcut the learning we need to do in order to understand concepts in the first place.
You won’t have a calculator in your pocket
I remember being at school and my maths teacher telling us we wouldn’t have a calculator in our pocket, so it was important to know how to do basic maths. They were right and wrong.
In the 1980s, none of us knew we’d end up carrying round phones with calculators built in. But they were right that you need to be able to sense check a calculation.
Picture a group out for dinner. The bill arrives. If you can work out that it’s roughly £45 a head, then when you punch the numbers into a calculator, or someone else does, you know whether the answer looks right. I’ve seen ridiculously high and low totals suggested on numerous occasions, simply because nobody had sense checked the maths.
Without that sense check, you haven’t got a clue. That’s the point. Outsourcing our learning to AI reduces our critical, creative, and strategic thinking, and common sense takes a back seat.
Asking an AI agent what it thinks can be really useful: a different perspective, a naysayer, a stand-in for your target audience, a sparring partner. The problem starts when we rely on it as a shortcut and stop thinking altogether. That’s lazy, and it’s a problem if you’re shortcutting your own learning.
However, what concerns me is a bigger problem for society if humans lose their critical, creative, and strategic thinking skills and rely on AI instead.
AI in learning works best when we think alongside it, not when we hand our thinking over to it.
I work with leaders and their teams helping them build thinking and problem solving skills. If that’s useful to you, drop me a line.