This is the year that AI explodes on the scene everywhere all at once. 

People still have a lot of different ideas of what AI is and how the emerging AI tools might change many industries. There’s a lot of fear that it will replace many jobs. I think that AI tools are in their infancy and that ultimately they will mature to become another tool that helps us do our jobs better. 

A good analogy is the development of desktop publishing tools. They burst on the scene and suddenly changed the publishing business to let everyone become a publisher (for better or for worse). Now, everyone can write, publish, do layout tasks, easily add graphics, fonts, color, and more. We hardly think about it. Graphic designers still exist and web designers have joined them. Publishers still publish books, magazines, and more. The jobs still exist, however, the work is done using different tools now.

Both technical writers and instructional designers do tasks that aren’t easily done by AI. Those tasks fall at the human end of human – computer interaction. For example, we need to understand our audience and what they are trying to accomplish. When a new product is developed, we are part of the first audience using that product. How a computer might think to use it is different than how a human would.

However, there are other tasks we do where AI can assist. Certainly editing content, creating outlines, helping to develop examples or learning activities. For some types of technical writing, it can create a structure and first draft of some of the content. You still need a writer to guide that, verify its accuracy, and more. 

I think in the future, perhaps the very near future, how we do our jobs will change. We will have better tools to do them. I don’t think that we’ll be replaced.

Here’s a video that shares some ideas of how an instructional designer can use AI. 

15 Ways to Use ChatGPT as an Instructional Designer, Instructor, and Teacher