Hi! Let's Talk About AI.
I'm Skits, and I work with Jerry over at Shared Knowledge Technical Solutions. You can't open a browser without somebody telling you that AI is going to change your business, replace your job, or both. It's a lot of noise.
This course is the quiet version. In about 12 minutes: what AI actually is, what it's genuinely good at, what it'll cost you if you're careless with it — and then you decide whether you need it. No hype, no sales pitch. Let's introduce ourselves first.
Before we dig in — what brings you here today?
No wrong answer. It just helps me know who I'm talking to.
And how much have you actually used one of these AI tools?
So What Actually IS AI?
Regular software follows fixed instructions somebody wrote by hand: if this happens, do that. AI is different. It learns patterns from an enormous pile of examples, and then uses those patterns to handle things nobody wrote a rule for.
That's why AI can do jobs we used to think needed a person — understanding a sentence, recognizing what's in a photo, making a judgment call.
LLM — the three letters you'll keep hearing
LLM stands for Large Language Model. That's the engine inside the chatbots you actually touch: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok. It learned language patterns from a staggering amount of text, and it uses them to predict what words should come next.
But AI is a lot bigger than chatbots, and you've been using it for years without calling it that:
- Your phone sorting photos by face
- Netflix and Amazon deciding what to show you next
- The spam filter keeping junk out of your inbox
- Your bank flagging a suspicious charge
- Self-driving cars
All chatbots are AI — but not all AI is a chatbot.
The Part Nobody Puts in the Ad
Here's the thing you need to know before you trust a word it says: AI can confidently make things up.
Remember, it's predicting what sounds right — not looking up what is right. So when it doesn't know, it doesn't stop and say "I'm not sure." It produces something that reads perfectly and is completely wrong. The industry calls this a hallucination, which is a polite word for it made that up.
Why this matters to you specifically
It won't sound wrong. There's no wobble in its voice, no hedging, no typo to tip you off. A made-up statistic and a real one come out in exactly the same confident tone. Always check its work. That's not paranoia — that's just using the tool correctly.
Skits' Tip
Think of AI like a brand-new employee who is fast, tireless, eager to please — and will never, ever admit they don't know something. Useful? Absolutely. Left alone with your reputation? Not yet.
Quick Check: True or False?
Four things people get wrong about AI. Mark each one before you move on.
Mark each statement TRUE or FALSE:
AI and chatbots are the same thing.
AI can state something completely false with total confidence.
If I don't use ChatGPT, I'm not using AI at all.
LLM stands for Large Language Model.
That's the foundation.
You know what AI is, you know it's already in your pocket, and you know it can lie to you with a straight face. That last one is the whole reason this course exists. Next up: what it's actually good at, and which tools are worth your time.
Click "What It Can Do for You" below when you're ready.