What my 7-year old son asked ChatGPT

Recently, I let my 7-year old son mess around with ChatGPT.

He loves Harry Potter and Roald Dahl and the concept that some stories can be “dark” has come up.

So here’s what he typed into ChatGPT:

“make a dark story about a mole”

Quick as a flash, the language model created a story about Milo the mole who finds a knife which is beautifully crafted but also (unbeknown to him) cursed.

Suffice to say the story doesn’t end well for Milo’s colony, or indeed for Milo. (Let’s just say the phrase “ruthless killer” cropped up…)

“Wow, that?was?dark.” said my son.

“No kidding” I replied, now questioning the wisdom of pairing my only child with an AI super brain of uncertain integrity.

But it was impressive watching the story appear before our eyes.

And there’s no doubt that AI is a game-changer in many fields. (Not just storytelling.)

Online courses are no exception.

In fact, one of the big course platforms just touted a feature that lets you generate your course “with a single click”.

Which means creating a solid but unremarkable course on almost any topic just became exponentially easier.

As far as I can see, in a world of unremarkable courses, the one with the best marketing wins.

If you’re really good at marketing and don’t care too much about the content of your course, then this is good news.

However, it’s also good news for anyone who wants to create a genuinely distinctive, personality-filled course fuelled by unique ideas that come from personal experience.

That type of course will stand out a mile from the soon-to-be-countless AI-generated courses that’ll all look like they were created by a committee.

It’s not that the advice in those courses will be bad (although ChatGPT is far from infallible.)

It’s just that it will be the same advice as everyone else is giving.

Everyone except, I hope, you.

By the way, I’m not saying don’t use AI. It makes some aspects of course creation ridiculously faster.

Just don’t expect it to create a course people will love.

What it’s truly good at is getting a generic course to market much faster.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m not in the generic courses market.

See you soon,

Glen