AI Is Making Your Training Look Like Everyone Else's. That's a Problem.
Last week I posted on Substack (Trident eLearning Weekly Grumble) about something I had been noticing on LinkedIn. Designer after designer was sharing screenshots of what they had built using Claude Design — and they were all excited about it. Faster development. Cleaner layouts. Professional-looking output in a fraction of the time.
There was just one problem. They all looked identical. Different organizations. Different industries. Different audiences. Different learning objectives. Same course. Dark navy background, three cards evenly distributed across the center of the screen, burnt orange accent text, the same clean sans-serif font. If you scrolled through the posts without reading the captions, you would have had no idea which designer built which course, which company commissioned it, or what the learner was supposed to walk away knowing.
That is the AI design problem nobody is talking about.
Faster Isn't Better If Faster Gets You to the Same Place as Everyone Else
Let me be clear about something before this turns into an anti-AI argument: it isn't one. AI is genuinely useful in the development process. It can build templates, generate layouts, suggest color palettes, and cut production time significantly. Used well, it is a powerful tool that lets designers spend more time on the things that actually require human judgment — the analysis, the strategy, the decisions about what learners actually need.
The problem isn't the tool. The problem is what happens when designers let the tool make the decisions that should be theirs to make.
When you hand AI your design choices, you don't just save time. You also skip the process that builds your eye. You skip the iteration. You skip the moment where you look at something and decide it isn't quite right — and then figure out why, and fix it. You skip the development of taste, instinct, and the ability to look at a design and know, without being able to fully articulate it, whether it's working.
Those are not skills you can outsource. And if you never develop them, you will always be dependent on whatever the tool produces — because you won't have the foundation to evaluate it, improve it, or know when it's wrong.
Developing Your Own Style Is Part of the Job
One of the pillars of good instructional design is developing your own style — a design voice that is recognizable, intentional, and specific to the work you produce. That doesn't mean ignoring trends or refusing to use tools. It means knowing why you're making the choices you're making, and being able to defend those choices on the basis of learning design principles, audience needs, and brand context — not because it was the default.
Your style is what makes your work identifiable. It's what makes a client trust you with their brand. It's what makes a learner feel like a human being made this, not a machine running a prompt.
AI can give you a starting point. It cannot give you a voice. That part is yours to develop — through practice, through iteration, through the slow and sometimes frustrating process of building something, deciding it isn't right, and building it again.
If you hand that process to a tool, you will produce training faster. You will also produce training that looks exactly like the training the person across LinkedIn produced this morning, using the same tool, with the same defaults, for a completely different audience and purpose.
What the Learner Experiences
Here's the part of this conversation that gets dropped most often: the learner.
The purpose of an instructional designer is to create a welcoming environment that engages the learner and stimulates as many senses as possible. That is the job. Not to produce a course. Not to hit a deadline. To create an experience that reaches the person taking the training, so he or she absorbs the material.
When everything looks the same, you are not stimulating the eyes. The learner has seen this before — the same dark palette, the same card layout, the same visual rhythm — and their brain registers it as familiar background noise rather than something worth paying attention to. When the narration uses the same cadence, the same phrasing, the same AI-generated voice patterns as every other course they've completed this quarter, you are not stimulating the ears. And when the layout requires nothing more than mindless mouse clicks to advance through screens that look identical to the ones before them, you have not created a learning experience. You have created a compliance checkbox.
That recognition happens fast. A learner who feels like an afterthought will behave like one — clicking through, half-present, retaining little, and returning to the work that was waiting for them before the course launched.
The Question Worth Asking
Before you accept the first layout AI gives you, ask yourself one question: would a learner who has taken ten courses built this way feel anything when they open mine?
If the answer is no — if your course is indistinguishable from the assembly line — you haven't finished designing it. You've just generated a starting point.
Use the tool. Don't let the tool use you.