Udemy Community Posts and AI

American Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said maybe sixty years ago about pornography, “I know it when I see it.” I’m feeling the same about AI on the Udemy Community postings. I look in just a few times a month, but it seems like I’m reading AI generated contributions a lot. Is it me or are we being subjected to typically stilted words, boring sentence construction, obvious ideas and long-winded explanations?

I’d much prefer personal sincerity and informal human generated sentences to AI. Can we stop it, should we stop it? Am I wrong?

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Comments

MichaelPog

Just report to the moderators.
I've been seeing this here as well.
If the moderators don't step in or start filtering people who join here just to spam, this community will become useless.

WilliamStewart

Hi, a thought for our Udemy community reps @RyanJaress
, @MarinaT
, @Bella

This group is described by Udemy as "Published Instructor Club is an exclusive space for published Udemy instructors to discuss topics, such as marketing and course management." (Emphasis added)

My understanding was that the StudioU group was for help in publishing a course. Once one had a course published, then one could join this group. However, the last few weeks, this group has been flooded with very generic posts like "How do I publish a course".

As a result I think it is fair to say the group has become not useful to published instructors any longer. I check in every once in awhile, see the flooding of very basic questions, and then check out, and I imagine most published instructors are now doing the same thing.

Perhaps this group could return to published instructors only?

Hope this suggestions is helpful.

William

MichaelPog

Personally, I wish I could set it so that when I log in to the community, I see only posts in the Published Instructor Club.
I'm not a community champion, I don't work for Udemy, and I'm tired of logging in and seeing introduction messages from new instructors, super basic questions like "Can I edit my course" or, worse, just ChatGPT copy-pasted spam.

Why is this relevant to me?
I want to hear, help, and network with published instructors.

Besides the irrelevance of those posts, I also end up missing important announcements and interesting posts from the IPP community and other published instructors because of all this noise.

I also noticed that I don't feel like coming here recently, and many instructors that used to come and be active here are gone.

Probably for similar reasons.

LawrenceMMiller

I used to try to be helpful to even the most basic questions from new instructors. But, I have given up and just assume the moderators will do that job. There are simply too many.

AHardin

I agree @MichaelPog
and @LawrenceMMiller
. Within the last several months, it feels as if the instructor community has turned into a place for defacto technical and policy support, ranting and raving from newer instructors, and extremely basic questions (that have been answered numerous times before).

Most meaningful discussions have disappeared, and a lot of the well-established community members are no longer active. And I think this has also led to a trickle down affect of the IPP community being a lot quieter as well.

@RobertBrown028
, I agree. ChatGPT cut and paste answers, which we've all seen a lot more of, aren't helpful. More often than not, they're irrelevant and incorrect.

Hopefully, the Udemy community moderator team has plans to right the ship or they'll end up being the new Udemy first line help desk support team.

Chrystie

@RobertBrown028
Thank you for starting this thread. Our team has also been noticing an uptick in seemingly AI generated posts. For now, we have been archiving those that are suspect. We are working on a more formal policy that will be posted in the community in the near future.

@MichaelPog
@LawrenceMMiller
@WilliamStewart
You are correct in that we are seeing a lot of beginner questions in the community, this is inherent to our community as we do get thousands of new instructors joining each month. We also tend to see a lot of duplicative questions that are asked....so we appreciate all the time that the experienced instructors have put in answering those questions over and over again. However, if those questions like "how to publish a course" are coming into the Published Instructor Club, my team needs to do a better job at moving those to the appropriate board.

The intent of this community has always been to encourage our instructors to learn from each other and all of you have been so gracious with your time and knowledge and we really do appreciate that.

MichaelPog

Hi @ChrystieV
, would it be a huge effort for Udemy to add a setting for us to hide all posts from Studio U and persist it so it applies every time I come here?

When I have time and energy to answer new instructors' questions in Studio U, I can go there.
But this is not our job to answer those repetitive questions, and our time is finite, with all my sincere desire to help new instructors.
Publisher instructors come here for a different reason, and due to this constant noise, fewer of us are coming here, which is bad for everyone.

The moderators can refer those repetitive questions to old threads or documentation.
Speaking of AI, this can be very easily automated with suggestions while the person is typing their question.
Stackoverflow had that for years before ChatGPT.

FrankKane

I don't get the motivation. What does anyone have to gain by posting a bunch of AI-generated responses here?

Maybe people who aren't comfortable with their English language skills are using it to try and sound more natural? Unfortunately it has the opposite effect.

WilliamStewart

Hi @ChrystieV
, one change to my comment. I see now that I have been seeing posts to the entire "community". When I click on the "Published Instructor Club", then I only see posts from published instructors. My finger mistake.

JosePortilla

I'm sorry, but as a large language model trained by OpenAI I don't have insight on what one would have to gain by using AI to post responses here. I can only generate responses based on the text that I was trained on, which has a knowledge cutoff of 2021.

KevinBurns301

Keep in mind that not everyone is a native English speaker, but may still want to post and they may use AI to post. I live in Japan. I sometimes use AI to get across what I want to say in Japanese as kanji is extremely difficult for me. So I have used Deep L or Chat GPT to translate. It isn't because I am a jerk. It is because I am trying to communicate in my third language.

That said, I suppose there may be bots here?

KevinBurns301

That was my point exactly. Your last point - trying to sound more natural. So cut the non-native English speakers some slack.