I use AI everyday, but I would never make a 100% AI course

In 2016 when I started creating online courses there was no AI around and the process was long and difficult. Inevitably there were mistakes – phrases that did not flow naturally, some contradicting statements here and there. You had to double check everything before recording. Sometimes you needed to make changes after a lesson was finished. Creating a course was a time-consuming initiative.

Then ChatGPT came around in 2022 and it made things easier. AI can check your accuracy, can correct your text and make it flow better. However, you still need to work on it. You provide the idea and the main points and then make the corrections. You cannot just ask ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini to write a text on a certain subject, and then read it to the camera. Besides the mistakes there is a habit of AI to make subjects seem more important than they are. Phrasings like “a fundamental aspect” or “a strategic shift” accompanying trivial ideas is common in AI generated text. You have to correct those, otherwise it will seem as if you believe everything in your course is earth shattering.

However, what I have noticed recently is that Udemy (recently merged with Coursera), the platform where I publish my courses, is full of 100% AI-generated courses. AI writes the text and an AI narrates it. The human input is practically zero. The effort required has faded away. This is good from the instructor’s perspective, but is it so good from the learner’s point as well?

There are a few obvious problems with this approach.

The first one is about correctness. AI hallucinations are a common occurrence. You may be learning about ISO 14001 and out of the blue the AI will tell you out something about information security or anti-bribery in that context. It may go further and explore subjects completely unrelated to the subject matter and since nobody is checking it goes on like this. Examples provided by AI to illustrate specific concepts are often times not representative or even incorrect. I had cases where examples were actually contradicting the idea they were intended to support. Without a human reviewing carefully the AI content these will go unnoticed and the learning experience will not be pleasant.

The second problem is the shallowness of the information provided. AI will gather things from public sources and provide a mix of content that is very basic but usually provided with adjectives such as “fundamental”, “critical”… You will learn the very basics of a subject, which is good if you really do not know anything about it. However, most likely the title of the course will be something like “Masterclass in business continuity and ISO 22301”.

Another issue that students may not like is that an AI generated courses will not provide you with stories of lived experiences. The AI cannot say – "in one company that I audited I had a conflict with a manager because" … or "they were doing this and that which was both wrong and time consuming". These experiences are valuable and they stick in the memory of the learner helping understand the subject.

Obviously, someone who makes the course using AI 100% is not a subject matter so any questions that the student may have will not be answered by a human. If the student finds something that doesn’t sound right and asks a question the answer will be also from the AI. “I am truly sorry and I understand your frustration. As an AI I should have done a thorough web search rather than using my general data”.

If you buy a course where the instructor never shows up on camera, the English is impeccable, there are no "uhhs" and "ohs" throughout, no small mistakes, nothing personal, no stories from real experience — you can be fairly certain that is an AI-generated course. It probably took the instructor one good night's sleep to make it. You can buy it and learn from it, but you should be aware of the issues I described in this article.

I use AI everyday and I find it very useful. It saves me a lot of time for many tasks. However I need to check the output always and 100%. I would be crazy to make online courses like I did 10 years ago. AI makes the creator more efficient and better overall. But this is a tool, it should support the content creator but not replace them.