I’ve been spending more and more time with Chat GPT. I ask for its opinion on difficult conversations. I ask it to summarise, cut unnecessary words and play devil's advocate.
Like a good friend’s advice, I take it with a pinch of salt – I use it to create a more informed picture, not as the sole source. As I write, my reliance on it is minimal – I doubt I know what it’s truly capable of and I have no desire to pass my entire job over to faceless AI.
This raises two important questions:
- What’s the possibility here?
- How do we self-police our reliance? When is it too much?
Answering the first one seems considerably less difficult, so I’m starting there. And I’m going to park question two for another time.
Chat GPT
In my experience with Chat GPT so far, (which I see as a PA with development areas), half the battle is asking your question in the right way (see above). You can definitely go around the houses.
I ask it, ‘How can you help me in my role as an L&D Manager?’ It humbly suggests it can support with:
- Training programme development
- Learning needs analysis
- Learning technology and tools
- Performance Support
- Evaluation and measurement
- Emerging trends and best practices
- It adds the caveat that context is everything.
Let’s see if it’s all talk. I share information on our recent coaching trial – an hour with a professional coach for anyone who was interested, to discuss whatever they wanted. I ask: ‘How do I evaluate and measure the success of this and decide on next steps whilst protecting confidentiality?’
As caveated, some suggestions miss the context. Despite stating it was an hour of coaching, proposals include supervisor or peer feedback and follow-up assessments to understand the longer-term impact. Both are pretty heavy weight and the anonymity angle makes it challenging. I’m on board with participant feedback on value, satisfaction, and self-reflection though.
I ask it to design a survey and receive fifteen questions. These might just take longer to answer than the coaching session. But this is what I like about Chat GPT; it gives me a starting point, and it overwhelms me with information I can mull over to pick and choose from.
I’m feeling lazy: ‘Which three questions are the most valuable in deciding the business and personal benefit of exploring more coaching?’
It launches into thinking of coaching more generically – not applying it to the previous learning initiative. I could remind and rephrase but I dust off my human brain instead and look over the 15 questions.
Chat GPT doesn’t have all the answers, but I do feel like I’ve had a useful discussion with an invisible team, realised some important aspects and have some serious work to get cracking with.
Adobe Firefly
This Beta tool includes a text-to-image prompt. I tried to use it to create a great image for this blog. I’m scared:
I didn’t have much success with this tool aside from ideas for nightmares. But it might work better for someone keen on image generation who wants to explore what else it can do.
Scribble Diffusion
In theory, it will translate your doodles (with a brief text prompt), into images. I thought this could be useful for when I need the right image fast. It gave me a good laugh for sure. Maybe if I was better at drawing…
Hey Pi
Moving swiftly onto an AI programme which professes to be a ‘kind and supportive companion.’ My research suggests it might be useful for practising tricky interactions with others.
I ask it to help me scrub up on my feedback delivery and throw a few curveballs along the way. It’s surprisingly responsive, working with me to understand the role it should play.
The lighter coloured text is me:
I ask for feedback on my feedback and get a detailed positive appraisal. We also practise several scenarios with different negative responses. It even keeps up with me when I get silly and calls me out.
This is pretty impressive! I can see myself using it to create examples and role plays in content and get some emotionally intelligent support. I’d also consider recommending it to others as an experiential playground.
Copy.ai
Alongside blog writing and idea generation, this tool wants to make light work of my social media posts. I ask it to write an exciting post about the benefits of learning in the workplace. It starts by addressing everyone as my LinkedIn Family (yuck) and boshes out a pretty uninspiring post. I try again, ‘something snappy about the threat of AI to L&D professionals.’ Boy, it’s fond of emojis:
But it’s not…terrible.
I ask it to, ‘Write a LinkedIn post relating a personal anecdote to why learning in the workplace is so important.’ And it does, very well indeed. I can even give it the story and it finds the L&D connection.
I feel a bit ill – I’ve been working on how to post on LinkedIn in a way that feels like me, so I have no desire whatsoever to utilise a tool like this. But the thought that it’s so easy to do and people probably are doing it, creeps me out.
I’m not crying about my £16,000 student debt for a Creative Writing Degree which AI tools can replicate, you are!
Tome
I sign up for the free version of Tome to get a head start on my presentations. I ask it to create something on great leadership.
Clicking refresh suggests a different title and possible content. I have the option to remove or add my own slides. I add, ‘The most challenging aspects of leadership.’ What I really like is It then builds out the presentation with images, including suggested content on my addition. I can mess around a bit with the colour scheme and import images, videos and links. A great choice, especially when time isn’t your friend.
To AI or not to AI?
This experience has made me fonder of Chat GPT – whilst it’s not perfect, it can lend a hand in such a huge variety of ways. I didn’t even touch on its ability to create quizzes from pasted information, proofread, create scripts, and support your own learning.
Whilst there are some other interesting and surprising free options out there for image generation, time management and practising human skills, wherever possible, I’m still inclined to reach out to real people.
I get the feeling that if you put some budget behind it, or even just stay patient, the capability is going to quickly climb and probably at a rate we’re not quite ready for.
Gemma Glover
Head of People
