Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) have been all the rage since the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. But is it all it’s cracked up to be?
For some things, it’s helpful, but for the most part, it’s been blown up in importance. Maybe it’s the start of something bigger, but for now, it’s mediocre help for training.
But that’s not to minimize how it can help you when creating training. Don’t expect it to do a lot for you, and don’t expect everything (if anything) to go well. At this point, it acts as a mid-grade personal assistant that can help get started, but not much more.
Don’t expect it to be a replacement for anything but bad content at this point, though.
I’m going to cover a few ways you can use GenAI to help you in your journey to train non-IT employees on corporate technology. That’s because that’s our ultimate goal at techstructional. I’m writing this blog post because I don’t expect any immediate threat from generative AI, especially in technical training. The quality of content from GenAI is far inferior to that of a human who does a good job, and it cannot compete on any front.
Don’t expect AI to replace a massive number of jobs anytime soon.
I use GenAI daily for various tasks, but most of them are on the back end. If anything from GenAI makes it to the front end, it’s heavily edited and unrecognizable from the version provided by our computer overlords. Our most significant use for GenAI currently? Getting ideas for blog post organization. But even that is heavily edited and rearranged, and not recognizable as what the AI provides.
As for how we’re using Generative AI in actual training development, our use is limited. But it can still be helpful for basic tasks that aren’t worth our time to consider and don’t require extensive research.
There are far more examples of how not to use GenAI in employee training than there are of its good uses. To save space, I’ll cover the same recommendations for both.
How To Use Generative AI To Train Employees on Corporate Technology
Whether you’re using ChatGPT, Google Bard (now Google Gemini), or any of the hundreds of other GenAI options, these are a few ways you can use GenAI to help train non-IT employees on corporate technology.
These uses of GenAI might save you time or provide a faster path to creating better content. That might mean you can spend more time on higher-priority tasks for humans, or take a break and have another coffee, thanks to your time savings.
Whatever you do with your newfound time is entirely up to you. I’ll use it to stare at the ceiling for a bit and contemplate the downfall of humanity due to GenAI. Just kidding.
Generate Questions
With the right prompting, you can generate decent questions for content. While this likely doesn’t help much in most corporate software training, it could be helpful for security training. That’s because most security training for users is based on ideas and theories rather than on actual physical systems or software walkthroughs.
Here’s a good example we had ChatGPT generate for us:
What is the most secure and easy-to-remember password that combines random words, numbers, or symbols, with the first letter of each word capitalized, and a length of at least 12 characters? A) G0odPa$$word! B) CorrectHorseBatteryStaple C) Sunshine12345 D) Qwertyuiop[]
And the feedback for these questions:
The correct answer is B) CorrectHorseBatteryStaple. While option A) G0odPa$$word! includes some secure elements such as numbers and symbols, it is a common pattern that hackers can easily guess. Option C) Sunshine12345 is a weak password as it is a common word followed by a numerical sequence. Option D) Qwertyuiop[] is a simple password and does not include a combination of numbers or symbols. Option B) CorrectHorseBatteryStaple, on the other hand, is a passphrase composed of four random, unrelated words that are easy to remember but difficult to guess. It also meets the length requirements and includes a mix of upper and lower case letters. This type of passphrase is considered strong and can be used to create a secure password.
And if you’re interested, here’s the prompt used to generate that question:
Write a good question to ask for the most secure and easy-to-remember password with one correct answer and 3 distractions that are around the same length.
However, you may want to generate a set of questions based on the content. If you wanted to do that, you would ask ChatGPT to create questions and tell it you will enter the content. It will generate what you want; you’ll need to proofread and revise, and then you’re done.
Just don’t overuse questions, because nobody likes a quiz that doesn’t relate to what they learned or doesn’t help reinforce training in a useful way. I have to call that out because it’s an essential point that needs to be made repeatedly.
Create Fake Information
I don’t know about you, but creating fake names and information for training can be challenging. Generating fake people is necessary for general scenarios that aren’t real-life examples from your organization. That might mean their name, statistics, or history relevant to the training is required.
That’s not an efficient use of time; while it’s important, it likely doesn’t have a material impact on the training to justify the hours spent. It’s possible to give some general directions to GenAI tools and have more details generated. You can even create a whole list of fake names to pull from.
This could be useful for the medical industry, where everything must be anonymous, meaning no actual patients. GenAI can help with that by providing a bit of context and information.
I used the following prompt to generate topical characters since I’m not creating them for specific training. But when you develop training, you’ll have to specify what you want to use, and you can tell ChatGPT (or Gemini) that.
Generate a few characters for my training with their age, some general information, and topical health information.
That’s all you have to do, and you can get detailed character information like this:
Name: Sarah Age: 27 General Information: Sarah is a young professional who works long hours at a tech company. She enjoys exercising and trying new healthy recipes. Topical Health Information: Sarah is currently dealing with high levels of stress due to work demands, and is seeking ways to manage her stress and maintain her mental health.
Name: Tom Age: 55 General Information: Tom is a retired factory worker who enjoys spending time with his grandkids and tinkering with electronics. Topical Health Information: Tom has recently been diagnosed with high blood pressure and is trying to manage his condition through diet, exercise, and medication.
If you want first and last names, ask for them!
Summarize Information
Sometimes, it’s necessary to reference other content in training, especially for corporate technology with dense user guides (yuck) or requirements. Instead of simply linking to external content in the training, paste it into your generative AI tool and ask it to summarize it.
You can provide a computer-generated summary for employees so they can grasp the key points in less time. That will help them access essential information quickly while minimizing distractions from the training.
Convert Content to Different Formats
If there’s one thing that Gen AI excels at, it’s summarizing and simplifying existing content. That means you could take a written script for a course and ask the tool to summarize it, make suggestions for breaking up the content, or even create topic summaries based on each section. Then, you can use that content in different places or even create executive summaries of training content.
It’s even possible to take a course narrative script and have Gen AI rewrite it into an instructor-led training format.
One thing to consider when using AI tools is that your company’s information is likely proprietary. That means you shouldn’t put it into a system that your company doesn’t approve. Tools like ChatGPT are free; once content is entered, that information becomes public. Enterprise versions are now available, but even those must be approved by your company.
Gen AI may not be great at generating original, high-quality content, but it can summarize and reformat existing content well. Notice I’ll always call out good. That’s because AI doesn’t produce much high-quality content; it’s typically mediocre or poor and requires such heavy editing that you might as well start with original content.
How Not to Use AI To Train Employees on Company Technology
There are many more harmful uses of AI than helpful ones. One of the best ways to avoid misusing AI is to prevent overreliance on it and to review and revise everything it outputs.
My best suggestion is never to have it generate original content. Have AI only work on content you input, unless you know the topic well and can verify its output. It will make stuff up (hallucinate) and act confident when presenting wholly fabricated information.
It will even create links that never existed and cite them as sources, so be very careful.
Don’t Generate Learning/Performance Objectives With AI
This is first on my list because I’ve seen many suggestions to use AI to generate objectives. The suggestion is always to paste your content and request objects.
The huge (massive) problem with this is that objects should never follow the content. The objectives are what people must do to succeed in their jobs; it’s not throwing a bunch of content at them and then figuring out what they could learn from that content later.
You could make no single more significant mistake with AI than having it generate objectives for you.
If you input content and ask the AI to generate objectives, you’re misguiding your training, and it’s unlikely to focus on performance objectives rather than learning objectives. Objectives must always be among the first items created after the needs analysis. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a content dump that helps no one and hurts everyone. It will also waste time.
That’s why we always begin with nothing when we start creating training. You can’t input anything into ChatGPT and expect performance objectives, so how could AI be a good solution for generating objectives?
I’ll tell you how: it can’t!
Don’t use it for objectives to generate content based on what the subject matter expert provides unless it’s a summary for your personal use.
Replace Human Trainers or Actors
It’s now possible to generate an entire video script and video with no human input beyond copying and pasting content. We did this when ChatGPT first came out to see what we could develop using only AI.
We generated this video by asking ChatGPT to create the script, pasting it into DeepWord (no longer exists) to generate the fake person video, and then generating captions with HappyScribe.
It was pretty simple to put together, but we don’t recommend it. It’s unpleasant to watch; the people look dead in the eyes, and the mouth is odd and creepily unnatural. It doesn’t add enough value to justify putting anything like this into production.
Not to mention, AI voices are fake-sounding for the most part. But aside from that, there’s no reason to show someone talking if that person is fake anyway; just use the audio.
AI will never replace real trainers with real personalities, faces, authentic voices, and genuine humanity. While we’re not fans of instructor-led training for technical topics, most types of training benefit from a real person rather than a computer-only approach. Even for narrations in courses without a face, AI voices can’t compare to a real person with a distinctive personality.
Have you ever noticed that even all the synthetic voice companies use real voice actors in their marketing videos? That’s because synthetic voices are garbage. They can replace bad narration, but they can’t replace quality narration.
So, don’t replace anything public or user-facing with synthetic voices.
We want personality!
Generating Forward-Facing Content
Don’t generate forward-facing content with AI and then publish it without heavy revisions. We would never publish AI content, even heavily revised, but that’s up to you. It will be rewritten entirely. By forward-facing, we mean content that actual people see.
As mentioned at the beginning, we use AI to generate outlines, then refine them and create 100% unique content based on those outlines. The AI content is never included in the training content or in our blog posts. AI should be kept in the background for everything but summaries and rehashing other content.
Replacing Human Interaction
While we’re not a big fan of instructor-led training for corporate IT training, it sometimes makes sense. For security, instructor-led training could be a good option. It allows people to ask questions and get immediate answers.
It’s not possible to replace human interaction with AI, and even AI-driven chatbots cannot fully mimic human behavior and personality. That means you can’t replace instructors, experts, and others who help organizations navigate IT changes. People often want to talk to others when dealing with complex topics and changes. AI can’t provide the same level of support; therefore, replacing humans with AI isn’t a viable option.
With great power comes great responsibility.
I mentioned earlier that I would offer equal suggestions for both using and not using AI. That’s the only reason I’m stopping here. There are infinite ways you should not use AI for training content or training. While it’s a powerful resource for certain tasks, it can be easily abused, and most AI-generated content is easy to distinguish from other content.
Wrap Up
You may love or hate AI, which may make you love or hate some of our dos and don’ts. However, some are unarguable and not a good use for AI to train employees on corporate IT topics. Technical topics can be challenging in training.
All the complexities of IT translate into training for corporate IT systems. Not to mention that corporate technology is typically full of custom and proprietary information. That makes it extra difficult for AI. However, with the uses we’ve presented here, you should be safe if you don’t enter any information from your organization into any unapproved Gen AI tool.
Avoid relying on AI to replace humans or take over too much (if any) of the user-facing presentation. Also, don’t let AI guide you down the path of poor training as an order-taker who doesn’t properly analyze training requirements.
AI won’t replace quality work from humans but will augment our daily work.
One thing remains true about AI and will continue for some time: it doesn’t offer the same benefits as human training. That is at least true for high-quality training, perhaps not for poor-quality training that AI might be able to compete with.
If you’re looking at ways to improve the performance of your corporate IT training for non-IT employees, we’d love to meet with you to discuss your next project. I know we can make your next tech project more successful, save your employees time, and reduce your organization’s costs while training employees better than they would have otherwise.
Schedule a free consultation so we can learn more about your project and how we can help it be a huge success.