“If you don’t care, then why should I” is the name of a nice study on how instructor commitment affects learners. The gist: the more the instructor shows commitment, even in the small details - that show effort, the better students learn.

It often moves me when I notice that someone has put genuine effort into teaching well and making a subject less intimidating. What moves me isn’t the jokes that lighten the mood or a particular teaching style, it’s the human effort behind it, the invisible work. It’s the fact that this person has actually thought carefully about how to teach this and didn’t want me to feel intimidated. And behind it all some sort of subtle respect for learners that’s hard to describe in words.

I think this is true in many aspects of life. Even in software engineering and UX in general, spending time on the smaller details does show that you care about your users. And people feel it. And it is is especially true in the age of AI, and I have some examples of how this might go wrong.

I often see on LinkedIn those cool AI diagrams explaining concepts in computer science or programming. They do look pretty and all, but ask yourself, when was the last time you actually read it? I never remember doing so for some reason, but now the reason is clear “if you don’t care enough about the material you are presenting, then why should I spend time reading it?” - This might sound a bit harsh but honestly some posts make me feel that the person who made them doesn’t even care whether I’ll learn something from it.

A different experience I had while making a presentation. I like to add hand drawn doodles and diagrams in the slide presentations I make. Even though it was simple and humble (I’m not really an artist!) I found that it grabs attention and increases engagement, perhaps because one could feel the effort and the joy I had creating it. As opposed to this, you might have felt how some AI generated slides feel empty and soulless.

And at the end, this is not to say never use AI tools¹, but if you use them, you should use them in a way that shows that you made effort. And I think effort is very hard to fake.

Footnotes

1. It’s annoying we need to state this every time we talk about AI. ↩