Beginner course · Chapter 1 of 8
What is AI?
What AI is, what it is not, and where it already sits in an ordinary day.
This page lists what a learner is able to do at the end of this class. It does not carry the class itself. The lessons, exercises and answers stay in the classroom and in the book.
What you will be able to do
- Open an AI chatbot and use it without anybody helping you
- Say in plain words what the machine is doing when it answers
- Name the five terms the rest of the course rests on
- Point to AI already at work in your own day
- Know what should never be shared with an AI tool
What the class is really about
The class starts before any explanation. A learner types a real question into a chatbot and reads what comes back. Only then do we talk about what just happened.
What happened is pattern matching, not thinking. The machine was never handed a rule book. Nobody wrote down what a cat looks like. It was shown an enormous number of examples and worked out the patterns itself. That one idea explains both halves of AI at once: why it can do things nobody knew how to program, and why it fails in ways nobody intended. Both come from the same place.
By the end you can name the five words the rest of the course leans on. Algorithm. Data. Model. Training. Input and output. You are not asked to memorise them. You will have used all five before anyone defines them.
We spend time on where AI already sits in your day, and it is further in than most people expect. The delivery app guessing your order. The maps app choosing your route. The keyboard finishing your sentence. The crop price app. This is not a new technology arriving. It arrived a while ago.
The most important part of the class is the part that is easiest to skip. AI can be wrong, and it is wrong in a particular way. It hands you a confident answer whether that answer is right or not, in the same steady tone either way. Nothing inside it is checking against the world. A learner who leaves with only that one idea is already ahead of most people using these tools today.
Careful use
Personal data. What must never be typed into an AI tool, and why.
Careful use is not a separate lesson at the end of the course. A piece of it belongs to every one of the eight classes, and this is the piece that belongs to this one.
How this class is taught
- One core concept. The class carries a single idea. Nothing is covered twice and nothing is rushed.
- Hands before theory. You do the thing first. The explanation lands better once you have seen what happened.
- Practice in company. Weekday slots in the lab follow the weekend class, with somebody there to help.
- Mixed ages at one table. The youngest in a batch may be ten and the oldest past fifty. Each takes something from the other.