Why less in AI may be more

“Forget artificial intelligence – in the brave new world of big data, it’s artificial idiocy we should be looking out for.”
– Tom Chatfield

The explosion of artificial intelligence into our lives has entered the world of learning & development, and we’re glad to see there are L&D leaders taking a serious look at its potential and its implications.

One of our favorite learning design partners, Julie Winkle Giulioni, an author and thought leader in workplace development, has expressed some concerns and offers a critical look at how we can best consider the value that AI brings to learning.A

The key ingredient, she says, is the AI tool’s corpus, a new term for most of us. Michael Grothaus defines corpus in a recent Fast Company article as “the material the AI reviews to become intelligent in whatever it was designed for.”

In a new blog post on our website, Julie explains:

“Here’s the rub: the quality of the answers is dependent upon the quality of the material that’s been scraped. It’s sort of a ‘garbage in, garbage out’ situation. Or perhaps more accurately ‘unknown in, untrusted out’ in this case. How can we confidently have learners asking questions of a source whose own sources are opaque? It’s becoming clear that corpus credibility matters.”

“Imagine,” she says, “learners being able to get targeted answers to their most pressing questions from a fully vetted and philosophically aligned thought leader or author. No need to imagine because this capability exists and is being implemented by more content providers every day.”

Indeed! Julie has developed her own “ChatJWG” tool she calls the GrowBot, which we featured earlier as one great thing. We love it, and we’re looking forward to seeing our other thought leaders push the boundaries of AI with credible, content-rich AI learning tools.

Read Julie’s full article on our website here!

One great thing for 07.11.23 – TED Talk: Can we build AI without losing control over it? by Sam Harris, neuroscientist and philosopher