I Use AI. I Also Think It's Ruining Online Courses. Here's My Honest Take.

Everyone told me AI would change everything. And honestly? They weren't wrong. But not quite in the way they promised.

I remember the first time I asked AI to help me build something for a course. The response was impressive. Confident, thorough, fancy words, beautifully formatted. And then I looked closer. The ideas were fine. But they could have belonged to anyone. There was no trace of the person who was supposed to be teaching the course. No specific story, no hard-won insight, no voice.

That's when I started paying closer attention to what AI actually does well and what it's not so good at. Especially when we let it do too much.

Let me tell you about the time I spent way too long in Terminal trying to generate subtitles.

I was working on a course project and had created a slide presentation with a talking head video. I wanted subtitles and a transcript. Not as a nice-to-have, but because I genuinely believe that making your content accessible in multiple formats matters. Different students learn differently. Some need to read along. Some are watching without sound. Accessibility isn't an afterthought for me. It's part of what good course design actually means.

But I digress... Anyway, we were on the lowest tier of our course platform, which put a hard cap on how many minutes it would transcribe. So I needed another way.

I asked Claude for free options. Got a list, picked the recommended one, went to check it out. And of course, the free version was barely functional. Back to Claude. That's when Terminal came up as an option "if you're willing to try something a little more difficult."

I want to be honest: it didn't work the first time. Or the second. Or the third. I kept hitting errors, enough that Claude actually suggested I try a different route altogether. And here's where I'll tell you something about myself.

That suggestion made me more determined, not less. If I could crack this, I'd have a free, repeatable solution I could use for my own work and offer to every client I work with. That felt worth the time and hassle.

So we kept going. And eventually we got there. Subtitles generated, transcript created, accessibility box ticked, zero dollars spent.

What I learned wasn't just a technical workaround. I learned something about how to actually use AI effectively. How to prompt better, how to use screenshots to show exactly what error I was seeing, how to treat it less like a vending machine and more like a persistent thinking partner who sometimes needs more information to help you.

And that's really the point of all of this.

AI is a powerful tool. But it's not a replacement for you. Our job isn't to copy and paste whatever it produces and call it done. Our job is to stay critical. To read, edit, review, and fact-check. To use it to outline and plan, to clean up copy we've already written, to help put our ideas in order.

But never to outsource our creativity, our judgment, or our real-world experience.

Here's something worth understanding: AI doesn't actually think. It predicts. It generates responses based on patterns in everything it's been trained on. It's impressive, sometimes startlingly so. But it has no lived experience, no genuine perspective, no stake in whether your students actually learn something.

You do.

This blog post is a good example. The ideas and thoughts here are mine. I used AI to help me organize and clarify them. And then I went back through and made sure it still sounded like me. My voice, my experience, my opinions. That's the balance. That's what I'd encourage every course creator to find too.

So where does that leave us?

AI isn't going away. And I'm not suggesting it should. I use it every day. I'm even building a course for professionals who want to use AI effectively and responsibly. But there's a difference between using AI as a thinking partner and handing it the keys entirely.

Your students signed up for you. Your framework, your stories, the way you explain things at 2am when it finally clicks (or for me it’s the shower thoughts!). That's what they're paying for. And that's exactly what gets lost when a course is generated rather than created.

The courses that actually change people? They have a human at the center. Someone who has done the work, lived the experience, and cares deeply whether their students get the result they came for.

That's not something AI can replicate. Not yet. And honestly, I hope it stays that way.

If you're a coach, creative, or expert who wants to build a course that actually sounds like you and actually works for your students, I'd love to help. Head over to my Work With Me page to explore how we could work together, or reach out directly. I'm always happy to chat courses!