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 change everything after a lesson was recorded and finished. Course creation was a time-consuming initiative. As a result there were not many online instructors.

Then ChatGPT came around in 2022 and things got easier (much easier). AI can check your accuracy, it 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 to the AI and then make the corrections. AI can be a good filler of content. But it shouldn't be more. You cannot just ask ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini to write a script on a certain subject, and then read it to the camera as it is. 

Besides the usual mistakes there is a habit of AI to make subjects seem much more important than they really 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.

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. I see instructors that did not exist one year ago have hundreds of courses online. These courses are 100% AI generated. AI writes the text and an AI narrates it. The human input is practically zero. The effort required has faded away and the natural result is the sharp increase in the number of so-called course creators. 

It's easy now to make fully AI-generated online courses, but is it also good from the learner’s point of view?

There are a few obvious problems with online courses that are fully AI-generated.

The first problem 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  something about information security or anti-bribery in that context. It may go further and explore subjects completely unrelated to the topic. Since nobody is checking this content, it goes on like this. Examples provided by AI to illustrate specific concepts are often not representative, or even incorrect. I have 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 suffer.

The second problem is the shallowness. AI will gather things from public sources and provide a mix of content that is bare essentials 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 course 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. They stick in the memory of the learner and help make the subject real.

Obviously, someone who makes the course using AI 100% is not a subject matter expert, 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 one hundred percent. I would be crazy to make online courses the way I did ten years ago without any assistance. AI makes a content creator more efficient and, when used properly, better overall. But it is a tool. It should support the content creator, not replace them.