Forum Discussion
AI in Articulate: Excited or worried?
I’ve been looking at Articulate’s latest AI capabilities, and they are really impressive. But what does this mean for people like me who make a living designing e-learning?
We have reached a point where almost anyone can generate a polished-looking course in a very short amount of time – including layouts, interactions, content and images. You no longer need much design experience to produce something that, at first glance, looks highly professional. And that worries me.
Of course, creating something that looks like good e-learning is not the same as creating good e-learning. But I’m not sure that this distinction will always be obvious to clients and organisations. If an AI can produce an attractive course in minutes, it becomes much harder to explain why an organisation should invest considerably more time and money in having an e-learning professional design one.
And this is where I have mixed feelings about Articulate’s direction. As a designer, I want tools that help me do my job better and remove tedious work. But when the goal increasingly seems to be making professional-looking course creation possible without professional course designers, I can’t help wondering whether Articulate is empowering its professional users – or gradually reducing the perceived value of their expertise.
I’d really like to hear from other e-learning and instructional designers: Does Articulate’s new AI feel like a tool that makes you better at your job – or a tool that may eventually make organisations question why they need you at all?
8 Replies
Thank you, JudyNollet, for pointing to my recent thoughts on this! I just published a new post: AI Makes Course Development Faster. What Does That Mean for IDs?
AI can certainly generate courses that look polished in minutes. This is where I feel excited. As PhilMayor described: a good ID will use AI differently, and as ronald-hicks demonstrated, AI can save a lot of time while producing something that looks professional. But the real challenge is whether the course actually solves the learning problem. That’s where instructional design expertise matters.
AI lowers the barrier to production, but it doesn’t lower the barrier to judgment. Knowing what needs to change, and how to change it, is what makes learning effective. Without that expertise, organizations risk producing more courses faster, but not necessarily better learning.
So I don’t see AI as replacing IDs. Instead, it highlights the difference between “making a course” and “making learning work.” And that distinction is exactly where our professional value lies.
My concern is that some organizations may simply accept these “looks-good courses,” and that leads to another issue I raised earlier in my other thread: An eLearning Course May Be Teaching More Than You Intended.
Really well put. The guardrail that's worked in my corner is boring but effective: every screen has to trace back to an objective and an assessment before it ships. Polished slides that don't serve either get cut, no matter how good they look.
Both, but mostly excited — with one big condition.
I already use AI in my workflow (voiceover drafts, caption cleanup, transcript summaries), and the honest math is: it deletes the tedious 40% of a build, not the thinking 60%. Nobody's job was ever "generate slide text" — it's needs analysis, sequencing, knowing what to assess, and designing practice that actually transfers. AI can't do any of that; it just makes the production part faster.
The worried part is real too, and Judy nailed it: some orgs will accept "good enough" AI output and skip the instructional design entirely. My test for any AI output going to learners: would I stake a compliance audit on it? If not, a human reviews it. In regulated training that review step isn't optional — and that's exactly where our value lives.
So: power tool, not replacement. The designers who learn to wield it will outproduce the ones who don't — same as every tool shift before it.
On one hand, AI is making it possible for almost anyone to create something that looks like a well-designed course. That will inevitably make some organisations question whether they still need specialist instructional designers and e-learning developers.
But I also think we need to separate appearance from effectiveness. There are already plenty of poor e-learning courses out there. AI can help people produce them faster and make them look more polished, but a bad course with better graphics is still a bad course.
A good instructional designer will use AI differently. They’ll use it to remove the mundane work, generate ideas, create prototypes, speed up development and act as a second brain. The real value has never been clicking buttons in an authoring tool. It’s understanding the audience, identifying the performance problem, designing meaningful learning experiences and evaluating whether they actually work.
I think we’re in a transition period. Some people see AI and think, “Great, I don’t need to build my own courses anymore.” In reality, I think the industry will continue to need developers and instructional designers, but the role will evolve. The best practitioners will spend less time on repetitive production tasks and more time on strategy, design, performance consulting and quality.
Overall, I think AI will raise the baseline quality of e-learning. Courses that would previously have looked poor may now look quite good. But the gap between content that simply looks professional and content that genuinely changes behaviour or improves performance will still exist. The people who understand that difference, and know how to design for it, will continue to be valuable.
ID's, designers, writers/editors, and developers are at risk, but also the future of SME's themselves. At what point are SME's not SME's anymore? In many cases, an actual person has to be "certified" but what does a SME look like 5 years from now in the sense that everything you want or need to know is simply at the end of a prompt?
At this stage we can still say "we're not there" in a lot of ways, but it feels like a matter of when, rather than "if"? I suspect we are entering the era of "idea architects" in this space.
A paradigm shift is occurring, and we see the movements and the radical shifts occurring, but the scary part is we still don't know where the paradigm will ultimately shift this space to. Or, at least, I don't.
I've been wrestling with this in my head for a while now. Not just thinking about AI in learning development but in general... There's some really good points raised here that have got me thinking even more! The way I look at it is; work exists to meet human needs, so humans stay the customers even if they stop being the workers. If nobody earns wages, who buys anything? A company that replaces every worker with AI still needs customers, and customers need money. There's an old story of a Ford executive showing a union leader around a newly automated plant and joking, "How will you get these robots to pay union dues?" The reply was, "How will you get them to buy cars?"... This starts all the chat about universal basic income, public ownership of AI-driven production, shorter working weeks, taxes on automation, or the most likely outcome in my opinion; the owners of the AI capturing most of the gains!
I think there's still going to be a lot of jobs still valued because a human does it, teaching being one of them, along with care, performing arts, sport and anything you could call 'personal services' (keep your minds out of the gutter!!😆)... I think the transition is going to be pretty brutal but will work out in the long run... that's if AI doesn't decide to just kill us all!!
I look at how the world has changed over the years. As AI becomes increasingly widely used in so many areas I have to agree with both of you. Experience doesn’t seem to be as important. Will a SME become the designer and producer of an e-learning course with AI doing most of the work? Maybe in many cases. This can reduce time, cost, and produce a “Good Enough” learning experience. If I’m not paying a developer, I can afford to do it over at another time. I can see in some instances where good classes are waiting for a developer to get to it. Good classes take time, and if the company has a system with limited developers, you need to wait in line. If anyone can make an e-learning class, no more waiting.
You need to increase your profit, reduce your cost. I guess we will have to wait and see.
Short answer: Both (i.e., excited and worried).
Longer answer:
Some companies might have people use the AI tools to increase their productivity, but those folks will still make the big instructional-design decisions. That's exciting.
Other companies might accept whatever AI churns out as "good enough." That's worrisome. As Cory Doctorow wrote in "The Revere Centaur's Guide to Life After AI":
"The fact that there's a low probability that an AI will be able to do your job doesn't change the fact that there's a high probability that an AI salesman will convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job."
And some companies might end up somewhere in between.
It is scary to think about all the various jobs that have been or will be lost due to AI. There's a relentless corporate drive to increase profits, which are often achieved at the expense of employees. That works in the short term, but not necessarily in the long term.
Unfortunately, Instructional Designers aren't the ones making the ultimate decision. So it's up to us to make the case for why "good enough" isn't really good enough.
FYI: You might be interested in a related discussion in the Exchange Best Practices section of this community. This one is about working with AI or working for AI.
I also recommend going to JoanneChen's profile on LinkedIn, and reading her recent posts about this topic.
