I hope the year 2023 started well for you. It did for me, being re-energized after a two weeks off during the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. I didn’t work during those two weeks, but I kept an eye on the social channels that I use most: Twitter and LinkedIn. If you totally shut off for the holidays and are now wondering if you missed something: everything was about the new Artificial Intelligence powered chatbot ChatGPT (GPT stands for Generative Pre-trainded Transformer). You might be up to speed with that already and if not, I will tell you more about it in this edition of the Learning Notes.
It was very interesting to see how ChatGPT fuelled discussions in so many different areas of society and also in mainstream media. I guess the hottest debates came from the education sector. One side argued it should be banned at schools and forbidden to be used by pupils and students, who immediately embraced this new opportunity to get their homework done, writing essays, reports and so on. On the other side, progressive educators also embraced the new technology and already found ways to use it to support their teaching. The Learning and Development community also joined the discussion on how to make use of this new opportunity and the role AI can play in workplace learning in the near future.
It is really nice to see all kinds of experiments and applications that are created so fast. I also ran a little experiment for this episode of the Learning Notes. I have chosen only one post in which OpenAI (the company that launched ChatGPT) CEO Sam Waltman warns against using ChatGPT for important topics. Besides that, I looked at the results of Don Taylor’s Global Sentiment Survey (GSS) of 2022* which shows the results on the single question: ‘What will be hot in workplace learning in 2022’. The top three are upskilling & reskilling, collaborative & social learning and personalised learning. So, I asked ChatGPT how training providers can benefit from these three items.
*2023 results are currently being processed.
