The study explores opportunities provided by AI for creating pedagogic materials for teaching English for specific purposes. ESP instructors are involved in ongoing development of teaching materials due to scarcity of relevant textbooks. Despite abundance of authentic professional contexts on the internet, repurposing them for language learning purposes might be challenging for a number of reasons, i.e. complexity of ungraded texts or outputs of specialized corpora on the learners’ side as well as time-consuming and technically challenging design process on the instructors’ side, to name a few.

The study aims to discuss the following questions:
- are AI-generated contexts authentic and learner-centered;
- is information in AI-generated contexts credible;
- is there a difference between human-generated contexts and AI-assisted ones, can the learners tell them apart;
- what is the learning outcome of human-made, specialized corpus-assisted and AI-assisted offerings.

To answer these questions a longitudinal experiment was conducted throughout one semester. The students were offered human-made, corpus-assisted and AI-assisted tasks. The instructor evaluated and compared the learning outcome. The participants also shared their impressions about the tasks they were offered in terms of complexity, clarity and engagement completing a Likert-scale survey. The reflections on design procedures and potential limitations are also discussed in the study.

Overall, the AI technologies show great promise for ESP design. A number of shortcomings can be pointed out: insufficient sophistication of a number of tasks for upper-level proficiency students, less exciting content compared to human-generated texts, the need for the instructor to edit and improve the AI-output due to multiple errors and inaccuracies. Having said that, AI technologies allow us to resolve the long-term problem of scarcity of graded ESP materials. They empower the ESP instructor to create and customize pedagogic offerings for any level of linguistic proficiency and any major subject with ease like never before. This is an exciting development, which, I believe, will have great impact on the domain of ESP instruction in the near future.

Keywords: AI, specialized corpora, authenticity, ESP.