How to Tell if an AI-Generated Course Is Any Good

AI-drafted training fails in characteristic ways. Once you know the patterns, reviewing becomes fast — you're checking specific things rather than reading everything with vague unease.

1. Check whether the facts came from the source

Take five specific claims — a number, a deadline, a role title, a threshold, a process step — and trace each to the source document. If any of them isn't there, the model invented it, and you should assume there are others.

This single check catches the most dangerous failure mode.

2. Look for confident vagueness

AI writing tends toward statements that sound substantive but commit to nothing: 'It is important to follow appropriate procedures when handling sensitive information.' True, useless, and impossible to act on.

Scan for sentences that would survive being deleted. If removing a paragraph changes nothing a learner would do, remove it.

3. Test the knowledge checks by elimination

Try to answer each question without reading the content. AI-generated distractors are often obviously wrong — three implausible options and one that's clearly the answer. A question that can be passed by elimination proves nothing.

Also check for questions with two defensible answers, which models produce more often than you'd expect.

4. Check the sequence makes instructional sense

AI orders content by the structure of the source document, which is usually organised for reference rather than learning. A policy document might define terms for forty paragraphs before saying what anyone should do.

A good course usually inverts that: what you need to do, then why, then the edge cases.

5. Look for the missing 'so what'

The most common gap in AI-drafted training is consequence. It will explain a procedure thoroughly and never say what happens if you get it wrong, or why the rule exists. That context is what makes people comply when nobody's watching.

6. Check whether it's the same course as everyone else's

Ask whether anything in the draft could only be true of your organisation. If the entire course could be handed to a competitor unchanged, it's generic content wearing your logo, and learners will treat it accordingly.

7. Read one section aloud

AI prose has a rhythm — even sentence lengths, tidy tricolons, relentless parallel structure. Reading aloud exposes it immediately. Human writing varies; if every paragraph has the same shape, rewrite a few.

The review that matters most

Have someone who does the actual job read it. Not the SME who wrote the policy, and not the L&D team — the person who will have to follow this on a Tuesday afternoon. They will find the gap between what the course says and what actually happens, and that gap is where training fails.

A note on tools that admit uncertainty

It's worth preferring tools that tell you what they don't know. A generated document that marks unverified claims, or says plainly that a section is too thin to work with, is far safer than one that produces uniformly confident output regardless of the quality of its input.