How to Learn to Use AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay. Those who understand it and know how to use it will have a creative and employment advantage over those who don’t.

What I watched: “You Don't Understand AI Until You Watch THIS” by AI Search. Posted March 24, 2024.

Recently, I was watching this video of Scott Galloway offering his predictions for 2024 at OMR 2024.

During the presentation Galloway said this.

"By the way, AI is not going to take your job. Somebody who understands AI is going to take your job. Just get good at it. If you didn't want to learn computers in the 80s or 90s, it meant eventually you weren't as skilled as the person next to you. If you didn't want to learn Microsoft Office... Just learn AI. No machine is going to show up in the short term at least and take your job, but some young person who really understands this is going to show up and quite frankly just add more value for less money unless you understand AI as well."

That comment led me to begin doing some investigations into what some of the best information and learning resources for the average person might be to begin learning about artificial intelligence (AI) and how they could use it to enhance their work output whether that output is a personal endeavor or part of one’s job.

I’ve done quite a bit of reading and learning about AI. I’ve played with generative AI. I’ve completed a short course on AI. I know what sources I initially turned to when beginning to learn about AI. My own explorations provide a good starting point for how you can get started using AI too.

So, what should you learn about AI? The obvious answer is as much as you can, but in “AI may not replace you, but someone who uses it can — here’s the No. 1 skill you need to stay relevant” by Ernestine Siu, Siu identifies this as the top AI skill to learn currently.

The top skill to learn today is communicating effectively with existing AI-powered LLMs, according to Liew. Open AI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini employ LLMs.

“People use ChatGPT wrongly — because it looks exactly like Google search,” Liew told CNBC Make It.

When working with an LLM, the key is to be specific in your prompts.

“You have to give the AI a lot of context — treat AI like a very hardworking intern that will make mistakes occasionally ... If you think about it, if you’re [asking] an intern to do something, it won’t be one sentence. The intern would probably be scratching their head on what to do,” he said.

The best way to upskill on AI tools at home is to use them, according to Liew. Through practice, you can learn how to feed the LLM more descriptive prompts that will help generate your desired outcome.

What’s being referred to in Siu’s article is often called prompt engineering. This is how IBM describes prompt engineering.

Prompt engineers play a pivotal role in crafting queries that help generative AI models understand not just the language but also the nuance and intent behind the query. A high-quality, thorough and knowledgeable prompt, in turn, influences the quality of AI-generated content, whether it’s images, code, data summaries or text.

A thoughtful approach to creating prompts is necessary to bridge the gap between raw queries and meaningful AI-generated responses. By fine-tuning effective prompts, engineers can significantly optimize the quality and relevance of outputs to solve for both the specific and the general. This process reduces the need for manual review and post-generation editing, ultimately saving time and effort in achieving the desired outcomes.

Developing the best prompts for AI is so important there’s a new tool from Anthropic that helps people create effective prompts.

Prompt engineering has been gaining increasing attraction recently because people want to navigate AI more efficiently and get optimal outputs. But not everyone can be a prompt engineer or doesn’t have the time to learn it all; luckily for them, Anthropic, the creator company behind Claude large language model (LLM) and one of the biggest competitors of ChatGPT, has just announced a new prompt engineering tool that can turn your ideas into effective, precise and reliable prompts using Claude’s prompt engineering techniques.

So, based on all that, here’s my take on what someone entirely new to AI can do to learn about AI and how to use it. I believe these will provide a solid springboard from which to continue learning about AI.

Learn what AI is and how it functions.

The “You Don't Understand AI Until You Watch THIS” video at the top of this post is one such broad overview. But there are many available online. I just typed “best explanations of how AI works” into a search engine and was presented with an abundance of articles and videos. Take your pick. Poke around and read or watch a few.

You want to develop a solid understanding of how AI works without necessarily getting bogged down in too many technical details. A mile-high view is sufficient.

Reading “The Comprehensive Guide to Understanding Generative AI” will provide an excellent quick overview of AI and how it works.

Learn how to create effective prompts to produce the best results in generative AI tools.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the best-known generative AI tool and since there’s been so much written and produced about it, I think that’s a good place to start.

But ChatGPT is just one generative AI tool. In “11 Best Generative AI Tools and Platforms” they list 11 of the better ones.

My suggestion is to start with ChatGPT. You can sign up for a free account which will suffice while you’re learning. There’s a paid version if you later decide you need more robust functionality than what you’re getting with the free version.

Once you have an AI tool account, you want to learn how to create the best prompts. I took a great course from LinkedIn on prompt engineering, but there are gobs of such courses, tutorials, and articles to choose from. Enter “best ai prompt engineering tutorials” and you’ll see many. Replace the word “tutorial” with the word “courses” or “articles” and you’ll see yet more choices.

Again, take your pick. Poke around and read or watch a few. Courses are great, but you probably don’t need to take an actual course to learn the basics. However, if you’re someone who needs more structured learning, a course might be the way to go.

There are different flavors of generative AI.

Apart from generative AI that offers output in text form, there are AI tools that create images, videos, websites, and more.

If you’re new to AI, I’d suggest sticking with text output tools like ChatGPT. For most users, it’s the most useful type of tool. Other tools are more task-specific and you can learn about them once you have a good grasp of text-output AI.

Now, use it.

Nothing replaces actual experience using generative AI tools. Understand at a high level how AI works and how to create useful prompts, then do it. A lot. The more you use AI, the more comfortable you’ll get with the technology. It will lead to sparking your curiosity further so you can keep learning. AI technology is changing quickly. Be prepared for lifelong, ongoing learning if you want to keep your knowledge and skills current.

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