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AI enthusiasts like Peggy Dean and Lance Junck are making thousands teaching students how to use ChatGPT. Courtesy of Peggy Dean (L) and Lance Junck.

Lance Junck first realized the power of OpenAI's ChatGPT when he asked it to write a 1,000 word landing page for a website. He was working at an e-commerce startup, and the AI chatbot was able to do his job in 45 seconds.

Since the former full-time brand strategist discovered the buzzy AI chatbot last November, Junck says he's dedicated hours each day playing with it and consuming "every piece of ChatGPT content" on the internet.

"I just knew it was going to be a game changer," Junck told Insider.

Impressed by its generative capabilities, Junck saw an opportunity to teach people how to use ChatGPT and make some extra cash.

In late December, he launched a ChatGPT course on online education platform Udemy called "ChatGPT Masterclass: A Complete ChatGPT Guide for Beginners." The seven-hour course teaches students everything from how to write their first ChatGPT prompt to the ways ChatGPT can be used by businesses, students, and programmers.

In fewer than four months, Junck's course enrolled more than 23,000 students and raked in more than $52,000 in revenue, according to screenshots of Junck's sales dashboard reviewed by Insider.

The course has grown so much that earlier this month he decided to quit his job at the e-commerce company and turn his side hustle into his full-time gig.

Junck is one of hundreds of instructors who are making money teaching people how to use ChatGPT. Users have flocked to the chatbot to develop code, create lesson plans, and start their own businesses. Some have even used the AI to enhance their dating profiles.

But some struggle to integrate ChatGPT into their workflow, three ChatGPT course instructors told Insider. They each said there is a steep learning curve to using the chatbot to generate accurate, desirable outputs.

This could be why courses on how to use the chatbot have flooded online education platforms.

Udemy, for instance, currently offers more than 429 courses on ChatGPT that have enrolled more than 417,000 learners interested in mastering the bot a 47% increase since March, Callie Kaminski, a spokesperson for Udemy, told Insider. Skillshare, another online learning platform, offers 61 ChatGPT courses, while online course provider Coursera offers 10, according to searches made at the time this story was published.

The ChatGPT course instructors who spoke to Insider are all self-taught.

Peggy Dean, a 36-year-old artist and art teacher who runs a ChatGPT course on Skillshare, admits she does not have the technical training to teach ChatGPT.

"This is not my area," Dean told Insider. Like Junck, she said she's been "obsessed" with ChatGPT ever since it came out and has read "tons of articles" on the chatbot.

Saurabh Bhatia, a 48-year-old medical doctor who also teaches ChatGPT on Skillshare, echoes the sentiment. He said he "never felt like an expert" in ChatGPT.

Rather, Junck, Bhatia, and Dean said that they started their courses to share how they've used ChatGPT to make their own work easier.

Dean, for instance, has used ChatGPT to enhance her SEO practices, write product descriptions and landing pages, and generate presentations for her online art school. She compiled everything she learned to make an online lecture she calls "ChatGPT for Creatives: AI-Powered SEO, Marketing, & Productivity" on Skillshare that teaches students how to use ChatGPT for social media, emails, and research.

Bhatia started aSkillshare course on how to write an e-book two years ago. He added an AI component to the course, including lectures on how to use AI tools like ChatGPT to generate text and build promotional campaigns, as well as how to use DALL-E, an AI-image generator, to create a custom-made book cover.

Without technical expertise, these amateur instructors are aware that competition in the ChatGPT course market which they said is growing could hurt their businesses.

It was "now or never," when it came to launching her course, Dean said.

Junck said he's wondered whether there's "some kid at Cornell getting his PhD in large language models" teaching ChatGPT that would "blow me out of the water."

Even though they might not be technically trained in AI, the course instructors who Insider spoke to said their courses are raking in cash.

Junck said his course enrolls between 200 to 250 new students each day the majority of which are based in the US, followed by India, Japan, and Canada. Students from Venezuela, Russia, and parts of the Middle East countries where ChatGPT isn't available have also flocked to the course, he said.

Dean said she's been "pleasantly surprised" by the level of interest in her course. Since launching it in March, she has enrolled more than 3,500 students artists, writers, and game developers, to name a few and has earned $10,000 from the course alone, according to screenshots of her sales dashboard Insider reviewed.

Targeting a niche of creatives and breaking down technical concepts for them in an accessible way could be what drove the demand, Dean said.

More than 600 students have taken Bhatia's course since it launched, according to Skillshare's website. While he declined to share financials, he said he has seen a "significant increase" in sales since he updated his course to include AI.

He credits the demand to writers who are not technically savvy but are looking for ways to make the process of writing and publishing a book easier.

While ChatGPT may be seemingly easy to use, the three course instructors agreed that getting ChatGPT to produce high-quality outputs is a skill that requires practice.

"We still need to be intentional in our data input in order to achieve quality output," Dean said.

Bhatia agreed, saying ChatGPT can "churn out a lot of garbage if you do not really know what to ask."

Despite the occasional "garbage" answers and the meteoric rise of generative AI tools, all three course instructors don't believe they are cashing in on a fleeting trend.

Dean believes the people who have the "patience" and "willingness" to learn how to integrate the tool into their jobs will have a "huge leg up" compared to those who don't.

"The people who take action to build that muscle memory are going to supercharge their productivity if they do it the right way," Dean said.

Many workers have already integrated ChatGPT into their workflows, and its only a matter of time, Bhatia predicts, before the AI is integrated into tools that have been around for awhile. After all, companies like Microsoft have already made plans to add AI assistants into their preexisting tools like Word and Excel.

Dean, Junck, and Bhatia don't expect the demand for their courses to slow down anytime soon. They plan on continuously updating the course with lessons on how to use new AI tools like Google's Bard and Microsoft's new Bing when those are officially launched to the public.

A course "might not make you an AI prompt engineer," Dean said, "But it will help with your creativity and your workflow."

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ChatGPT course side hustle: Meet the teachers making thousands - Business Insider