World's first AI-generated online course created by Minnesota startup
MINNEAPOLIS – A Minnesota startup says it has made the world's first online course that was created entirely by using artificial intelligence.
ChatGPT is igniting the tech world. JazzJune founder and CEO Alex Londo wanted to see if it could be useful to his startup, a platform for users to create and share learning content. He gave it a try.
"I thought, 'Wow, I wonder what this can do in the field of instructional design.' So that's when I started poking it a little bit to see what its possibilities were. And that's when I discovered that this tool was incredible," Londo said. "Ten hours later, I had an entire 'introduction to artificial intelligence' course. That's right. I had artificial intelligence write a course about artificial intelligence."
With single-sentence prompts from Londo, the AI wrote an outline, all the lessons, and even found images and detailed videos about the subject. In all, the AI generated a full course made up of 19 lessons and a quiz.
"Even I haven't been able to pass the test that the AI created," Londo said.
Challenge accepted. I went home and took the three-hour long course, and passed with a score of 77. Maybe it was the note taking – or just dumb luck.
"The AI doesn't quite understand how to make blatantly wrong answers," Londo said. "Let's say the question is, 'What color is grass?' The AI, though, is going to write it so the responses are, 'Light green, dark green, mid-green or green.'"
So, how do we know the AI is producing legitimate factual information?
"You are touching on something that is going to blossom into a cottage industry one day. The fact checking of AI. Using AI to fact check itself. It's gonna get wild," he said.
Londo believes AIs like ChatGPT can do more good than harm in the classroom.
"If we really learn how to embrace it, teachers learn how to use it with their students, learn how to use it for themselves in their lesson planning and course development, you can go from spending five hours on that curriculum to two," he said.
We witnessed first hand as it developed a course outline in seconds on something we've struggled with lately: snow removal. JazzJune even divided it between commercial and residential snow removal.
"It's like an infant who can bat .300. It's crazy, and it's scary. But it's here to stay, and it's only gonna get better," Londo said.
If it's accepted.
"If you shift your thinking from, 'This is gonna replace me, no one's gonna have jobs,' and start shifting it to, 'How can I use this to make myself more productive?' And you're on the early wave of that, you will find success before anyone else," he said.
That first course about AI made by AI took Londo 10 hours of prompting. He's now got that process down to about an hour, using it to develop lessons on everything from wiring low voltage electricity to building a table.
