When you find your workflows for sale

Why my workflows are for paid subscribers only

I had a pretty upsetting week this week when I found another thought leader in education that I admire a lot selling a guide which was a workflow that I’d created. 100% sure I know it was me because there are often particular things (trying to track where things end up) that I put into particular prompts. It just kind of made me very down, and feel like I don’t want to keep doing this anymore.

I didn’t know what else they’d stolen. I’ve seen my work that I’ve been working with project-based learning and AI end up in other people’s frameworks. I don’t know if people are doing it on purpose but that’s the most challenging thing. I really don’t know what to say to these people. I asked one person, just got the confidence, ‘How did you work that out? that is the best thing I have seen all week’ and they told me very confidently they worked it out with AI. I asked for more details as I have been studying something similar. No reply. It’s very sad.

I’m definitely gonna still keep sharing on YouTube and creating some videos there but it’s also very difficult because you put it on YouTube, you put it on Substack, you put it anywhere that’s free, and you’re essentially giving your entire system for how you use AI well, how you work out high quality AI outputs. Someone can then listen to that system, adapt it for their own, and suddenly they have the great system that they start selling. I mean it’s a great problem in a sense. People say that imitation is a form of flattery and I appreciate that people are influenced by my project-based learning and high-level educational instructional design knowledge with AI, and that’s totally cool. When this is something that I work very hard for and it just ends up on large language models, I don’t want to block it because I want people to access it and be aware of it. The problem is how do you keep this from other people without putting it behind a paid subscriber?

If people use it and people are reading my blog and it inspires them to do something, I would feel that my subscribers on Substack, everyone I’ve met here, is amazing, would be credited to me. Everyone has created me on the Substack. I’ve received more credits on Substack than I have in many years on LinkedIn. I’m a thought leader on LinkedIn. I have many people use my things all around the world. I probably get one person tagging me every three months when people say they see my work in lectures and all over the place. Maybe they credit me in the keynotes and the lectures and I appreciate that people tell me. I’ve also heard a lot of other people use my work and take credit for it so I’m very sorry to do this.

If it’s a problem for anyone with money, then I’m happy to give some free months of just exploring and enjoying it if you were going to buy it.

My work is now under a paid thing, which I don’t particularly like, but I do have other blogs. I have the AI for Beginners blog and that’s going to be free. I’m not going to make that paid. I might have some paid guides on there just because some people have already paid for a subscription and I want to give them some extra value. It’s going to be a free blog with lots of basic information about AI. Occasional workflows will end up there as well.

I have Life in Mexico, which is all the research I’m doing with AI and challenging the idea that AI doesn’t make me smart or whatever people say. I want to show how I can do this research and verify it with people in Mexico.

I will continue to send weekly updates of what I’m posting. I’m sorry if you enjoyed some of the free workflows and they’re not there anymore. If you understand, I work very hard at this. This is my full-time job, making AI workflows for education, for business, for government, with some big projects I’m involved in around the world. I want to kind of protect my intellectual property as much as I can. I don’t believe that I’ve been left out of credits on purpose. I think they’re just going to AI, asking for solutions, finding my work and not realising it’s even mine.

Phil