Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt personally victimized by the AI drivel clogging up your social media feeds.
Whether it’s bizarre cheating scandals involving AI-generated fruit, impossible recipes, fake celebrity endorsements, or ads clearly designed to separate someone’s grandma from her credit card number, it’s easy to look at the current landscape and decide you’d rather opt out entirely.
However, for most of us, that’s not really an option.
As an instructional designer, my job is to bridge the gap between complex information and meaningful learning. I take expertise that lives in someone’s head and turn it into something another person can understand, remember, and apply. And whether I like it or not, AI has moved into the neighborhood.
Sometimes it feels like technology is developing at a pace that feels impossible to keep up with. Trying to compete with it is a losing battle.
Instead, I’ve found it helpful to think of AI as a tool for becoming a useful idiot.
Before the subject matters come for me, let me explain.
One of the biggest challenges in instructional design is getting smart enough to ask the right questions. When I’m assigned a project about a process, system, or industry I’ve never encountered before, I need enough background knowledge to understand the conversation and not waste people’s time.
That’s where AI can shine.
At Instructive Edge, this mindset is central to the Discover phase of our DRIVE methodology. Before we ever sit down with a subject matter expert, we use AI to help accelerate the homework phase of the project. It can summarize regulations, explain terminology, identify common workflows, generate preliminary outlines, and help us organize what we already know.
The result isn’t expertise. It’s context.
AI helps me walk into a SME interview knowing the difference between the acronyms, understanding the general process, and having a list of intelligent questions ready to go. In other words, it helps me become a useful idiot.
I’m knowledgeable enough to follow the conversation, but ignorant enough to know what I don’t know.
That’s important because the goal was never to replace the SME. The goal is to spend less time asking questions Google could have answered and more time uncovering the information that only a human expert can provide. The edge cases, the institutional knowledge, the shortcuts, the mistakes people make, and the reason things are done a certain way – those are the things AI can’t reliably discover on its own.
This is why I remain skeptical whenever someone claims AI is about to replace instructional design. AI can generate content, summarize, information, and create first drafts at impressive speed. What it can’t do, though, is determine whether a learner actually needs training in the first place.
It can’t navigate competing stakeholder priorities, facilitate a productive SME conversation, identify performance barriers, or especially make thoughtful instructional decisions based on audience needs, organizational culture, and overarching business goals. Those responsibilities still belong to us.
If anything, AI is making strong instructional designers more valuable, not less. By automating some of the mechanical work, it gives us more time to focus on the human work: asking better questions, validating assumptions, building relationships with experts, and creating learning experiences that actually solve problems.
As an aside, I live in creative spaces outside of my instructional design work. I regularly perform in community theatre productions, work on graphic design projects, and film videos for nonprofits. I hate the idea of any creative work being leveraged into creating something “original” in a generative AI platform. This approach to utilizing AI is the most ethical way of using it I can think of in this industry.
So yes, I use AI.
But I don’t use it to steal ideas or because I think it’s smarter or more creative than SMEs. I use it because it helps me show up prepared enough to learn from them and create something new and very human.
