Ft. Nicole Leffer, Thinkific course creator and founder of A. Catalyst.
There’s no doubt that since its explosive rise in late 2022, ChatGPT has shaken up the digital education space; As of early 2025, ChatGPT reached roughly 400 million weekly active users, with around 122 million using it daily. Since February, this number has increased by 25%, exceeding weekly users to 500 million.
For many online experts, emerging technology is both a powerful ally and a potential threat. We sat down with Nicole Leffer—Thinkific course creator, founder of A. Catalyst, and an expert in this space (she added an extra six-figures a year to her income through her Thinkific course on generative AI)—to get her take on how to keep course creation human in an increasingly automated world.
Within moments of speaking with Leffer, it became clear that storytelling is essential to building connection. She believes that by strategically using AI tools like ChatGPT, online course creators can make better, faster, and more impactful courses. But to use it effectively and stand out in the often-crowded online world, she recommends that experts use their life experiences, stay authentic, express their personality, and treat the tool as a collaborative partner—not a rival.
“ChatGPT is a great resource,” shares Leffer. “As experts, we can look at it with fear, stress, and anxiety, or we can look at it as something that helps us better bring ourselves to our content in a better, faster way—helping us serve more people.”
In this blog, we’re sharing Leffer’s top five tips to stay human in the age of AI:
Skip ahead:
- Leverage your life experience
- Infuse your authentic personality
- Encourage emotional buy-in
- See ChatGPT as a collaborator, not a competitor
- Remember your worth
1. Leverage your life experience
According to Leffer, the number one thing AI can’t replicate is someone’s real life experience.
“AI will never live a life, it’s only consumed training data on the concept of living a life.” she says. “When I talk about life experience, I mean something you have lived in your human form.”
In this way, someone’s unique perspective and experience is what stands out.
“The storytelling of your own experience—and why it matters—is a huge differentiator between human-generated and AI content,” continues Leffer.
She strongly believes that AI can’t compete with your humanity. “Don’t just give people information,” she says. “Give them a relationship to the information.”
Even if you don’t resonate with being a ‘storyteller,’ Leffer says that, while it may seem paradoxical, ChatGPT can help you find your voice. By using AI to brainstorm, explore different tones, or refine your message, experts can uncover what feels most authentic to them—and build confidence in their unique perspective. “Don’t look at AI as the enemy; look at it as the assistant,” she encourages.
2. Infuse your authentic personality
Along with bringing your life experience to your work, there’s power in infusing your unique, authentic personality into your content.
“You have to bring something to your courses that AI never could, like your personality,” she says. “It’s just as important to focus on why somebody’s consuming your content as the actual content you create.”
To stand out? Combine both life experience and personality. This differs from AI’s mode of operandi; according to Leffer, AI creates a collective perspective based on different content on the Internet. To differentiate yourself, focus on the unique way you bring your voice to your expertise. “Yes, AI is starting to get more and more personality, but it’s still not an actual human personality,” she adds.
While it may feel vulnerable or uncomfortable leaning into your authentic self, Leffer assures that this is the biggest difference between human-created and AI-created content. She believes that authenticity is especially important when it comes to marketing your course; For Leffer, this looks like resisting completely filtering her thoughts in her marketing material, choosing to instead share what naturally comes to mind.
“Of course, I’m not going out there and saying inappropriate things, but I’m telling people the truth and I’m not trying to fake being something I’m not,” she says.
In her case, her audience appreciates the way that she shows up on LinkedIn. “Sometimes I make videos on LinkedIn when something interesting and relevant to my audience pops into my head,” she shares. “I go on video in whatever I happen to be wearing around my house and I talk to people. My audience loves that I’m not so buttoned-up and polished.”
“Your audience is human, too—they’ll like that you’re not trying to be something that you’re not,” she emphasizes. “Be who you are. You don’t have to be a different version of yourself for people to buy from you.”
3. Encourage emotional buy-in
According to Leffer, the human element of content is what causes people to emotionally buy into what you’re teaching. The key? Remember the problem that your unique content solves.
“The reason you purchase a course is because you’re trying to fill a need,” she says. “Maybe you’re buying a course to help you be better at your job—which provides a feeling of stability. Whatever it is, you’re trying to fill a psychological need.”
As AI becomes more integrated into everything we do, Leffer believes that we are increasingly craving connection. “Through your course, you can tie your content to the emotional need that someone’s filling by learning from your content,” she says.
Her recommendation? Avoid making your content dry and boring, because, she says, “ChatGPT can do that all day.”
“AI tools are going to get better and better at being able to present information and facts,” she explains. “You need to go beyond factual presentation to get that psychological buy-in to whatever you’ve created.”
Her way to do that is by demonstrating why your course topic matters—through examples, storytelling, and being real. “AI can demonstrate it hypothetically or through the stories of other people, but you can demonstrate it through your own life experience,” she shares.
4. See ChatGPT as a collaborator, not a competitor
Leffer feels that it’s becoming trendy to spot AI and bash it.
“Don’t stigmatize AI,” she warns. “The reality is that the vast majority of what we’re going to consume is going to be impacted by AI—and AI is an incredible tool to use as a course creator and in marketing your course.”
She encourages folks to see the tools as something that can make their courses better.
“There’s nothing that is more powerful than a human that understands how to leverage AI,” she says. “You’re going to have far better content and marketing material than a human alone or AI alone; combining the two is where the magic is.”
To stay human in the age of technology, Leffer emphasizes that your core ideas need to come from you, the expert. In fact, she strongly advises against having ChatGPT create a curriculum for you. “The second your course isn’t you and your ideas is the second you begin to compete with AI,” she shares.
“ChatGPT can help you think through your curriculum, but your course needs to be your ideas and your thinking. Have a collaborative conversation with it to flush out your thoughts and help you structure them, but allow the creativity to come from you.”
Learning how to communicate with the tools is vital. With ChatGPT, for example, she recommends learning how to have an effective conversation and get it to do what you want. In this way, you can give it your unique ideas, thinking, and structure, and then the tool can help you to improve and refine it. “It’s easy to have a very basic conversation with ChatGPT,” she warns. “It’s not easy to intuitively know how to get great results out of it; those are two very different things.”
In Leffer’s case, she teaches people how to use AI—in a “deeply human way.” She didn’t rely on ChatGPT to build her curriculum; Instead, she recorded her course videos herself, then used AI-integrated tools like Descript to edit and transcribe them. From there, she used AI to generate course notes, write lesson descriptions, craft learning objectives, and format everything into HTML.
The way she uses AI has saved her “endless hours.” The thing is, the course content was entirely hers; AI was simply her collaborative assistant. In this way, it didn’t replace her humanness; it optimized it. “My course is my thinking, ideas, and language—and AI helped me organize it and turn it into a really helpful resource,” she shares. “AI made my course a higher quality course—not just from a time-saving standpoint, but also in terms of the quality of material.”
5. Remember your worth
For those who are concerned that AI is making them less relevant, Leffer has some advice.
“Take a deep breath,” she reassures. “Feel that feeling and acknowledge that there’s some truth to it. But if you’re an expert, your target market isn’t the person self-educating on ChatGPT—and in reality, the vast majority of people aren’t self-educating through ChatGPT.”
“Don’t gaslight yourself into believing that [AI] isn’t dramatically affecting you, because it’s affecting every one of us,” she empathizes. “But for many people, ChatGPT isn’t an appealing way to learn. Acknowledge that the person you’re selling to is someone who wants a course—and wants to learn from you.”
When you remember your worth and what you bring to the table, you can create content in an increasingly human way. Leffer recommends that experts constantly push themselves to differentiate. This means becoming more authentically human.
“Every single time you create content—even if AI is helping you—think about how you can make it as human as possible.”
For example, creating interactive experiences for people can help humanize your content. Hosting Zoom office hours, where students and instructors can meet face-to-face, is one way to do so. Live coaching is also a way to bring that more human element into your teaching.
Finally, she acknowledges that as an expert, the only limits on your success are made by you—in your mind.
“You have the ability to insulate yourself in the future in a way that very few can because courses are so scalable; you could sell one or you could sell one million, depending on how you market it. The limits you have are in your mind; don’t believe them.”
Interested in standing out in the digital world in a human-centred way? Don’t wait—sign up for Thinkific for free today.
To read Part 2 of this blog series, jump to the post here.
The post Keeping it Human: Standing Out in the Age of AI (Pt. 1) appeared first on Thinkific.
