I read an interesting article the other day where a teacher was really perplexed with the responses her students were giving her. It seems they’d been using a search engine to augment their work – the search engine was, of course, Chat GPT.

I wanted to test this out and asked it to produce alternative facts about workplace learning which sounded true but weren’t quite correct. This is a few of what it came up with:

• Most employees forget 70% of training content within 24 hours
• The presence of a learning management system (LMS) ensures a strong learning culture
• Employees are more likely to engage in training if it includes a certificate
• Employees prefer self-directed learning because it gives them freedom
• Interactive slides always make training more engaging
• Team-based learning is the most effective way to foster collaboration
• A high Net Promoter Score (NPS) for a course guarantees learning outcomes
• Role-playing exercises are essential for behaviour change
• Every learner prefers highly visual content over text-heavy materials
• Learning technologies automatically improve training quality
• Training must always align with job descriptions
• Learning at lunchtime boosts productivity in the afternoon
• Post-training email nudges are the best way to drive behavioural change

There are a few elements to this that I was interested by.

Firstly, they sound almost true because of some of the certainty words in the statements, e.g. best, automatically, must, etc. Change these words and there’s a kernel of truth in there – thanks Jayne Davids for spotting this.

Secondly, they’re the kind of statements I’ve been hearing in L&D for decades now. Commonly described as based on a study (which no-one can remember or cite), they’re smashed together and written large to create a marketing message which catches your eye, and the budget holders’ attention.

Lastly, this is a sample of just a few of the responses. I asked a specific prompt and it gave me 10. I asked for more examples a repeated number of times and now have 100 almost truths which I could – if I wanted – sprinkle into learning conversations. What does it say about our industry where a LLM has so much content to be able to produce what is, on reflection, almost perfect autocomplete?