The AI tools actually worth your time (an honest list)

Welcome to the first issue of the AiDDIE newsletter.

If you're here, you probably already know AI matters for instructional design. You've maybe tried a few tools, gotten some decent outputs, gotten some terrible ones, and wondered why everyone keeps talking about this like it's solved.

It's not solved. But it is very usable — if you know what to reach for and when.

That's what this newsletter is for. No hype. No "AI is going to replace you" panic. Just honest, practical guidance from someone who lives at the intersection of instructional design and AI every single day.

Let's start with the tool question everyone asks first.

I'm going to skip the long listicles and give you the short version — organized by what you're actually trying to do.

For writing and thinking — Claude or ChatGPT

These are your primary design partners. Use them for drafting learning objectives, writing scripts, building course outlines, brainstorming activities, and processing SME content.

My honest take: Claude handles long documents and nuanced instructional context better. ChatGPT has a bigger ecosystem of plugins and integrations. Start with one, get good at prompting it, then decide.

Neither one works well out of the box for ID tasks. The difference between a mediocre output and a great one is almost always the prompt — which is exactly why we'll spend a lot of time on that in future issues.

For video — Synthesia or HeyGen

Both turn text into video with AI avatars and voiceover. Both are genuinely useful for demo content, soft skills training, and anything where you need talking-head video without a studio.

Synthesia is more polished and enterprise-ready. HeyGen has been catching up fast and tends to be more flexible for custom avatar work.

Neither replaces a real video production when stakes are high. But for rapid prototyping or internal training? They're legitimately good.

For audio and voiceover — ElevenLabs

If you need narration, ElevenLabs produces the most realistic AI voices on the market right now. The gap between this and a human voice actor has narrowed significantly.

One honest caveat: for high-visibility, external-facing content, I'd still hire a voice actor. For internal training, job aids, and rapid iteration — ElevenLabs is a real time saver.

For research and synthesis — Perplexity

When you need to pull together background content on a topic fast — industry context, learning theory references, subject matter grounding — Perplexity gives you cited, current results. It's replaced a lot of my early-stage Google searching.

For course authoring with AI built in — Articulate AI (inside Rise)

If you're already living in Rise 360, the AI-assist features are worth exploring. They won't write a whole course for you — and you wouldn't want them to — but they're genuinely useful for generating draft text blocks, quiz questions, and scenario starters that you then shape into something real.

Here's what the research actually shows: nearly 28% of instructional designers still never use AI, and a big reason is that 37% don't know if they're even allowed to use it in their work.

If that's you — that's a policy conversation worth having with your org before anything else. No tool list matters if you don't have clearance to use it.

And for those already experimenting: the tools are only part of the equation. The bigger unlock is building a repeatable prompting system around your actual workflow. That's what separates consistent, high-quality AI output from the hit-or-miss results most teams are getting right now.

We'll dig into that next issue.

Until then — work smart.

Gus Founder, AiDDIE aiddie.co · Reply to this email anytime

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