AI Basics · free chapters · in English

Most people using AI at work have never been told what it is doing. AI Basics fixes that in an afternoon.

Six chapters, free, no prior knowledge. No programming, and no mathematics beyond what a sentence can carry. An optional paid exam at the end leads to a certificate.

What you take away

    Covered in six chapters

      Who contributed

      Two people wrote the sections that carry their names

      Those passages are printed as they were sent. Where the course argues with itself, it is not arguing with them.

      Sources

      Everything the chapters rest on, by chapter. Legal texts are cited from the consolidated version, which is the only one that is current.

      1.1 How does AI work?
      1.2 AI Failure Modes
      • Ji, Z. et al. (2023): Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation. ACM Computing Surveys 55(12).
      • Lewis, P. et al. (2020): Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks. NeurIPS 2020. arxiv.org/abs/2005.11401
      • Lin, S., Hilton, J., Evans, O. (2022): TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods. ACL 2022. arxiv.org/abs/2109.07958
      • Mata v. Avianca, Inc., U.S. District Court, S.D.N.Y., sanctions order of 22 June 2023 (Case 1:22-cv-01461).
      • Moffatt v. Air Canada, British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal, 2024 BCCRT 149.
      • Deloitte Australia and the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, 2025: contemporaneous reporting in the Australian Financial Review and Guardian Australia.
      • Expert contribution: Prof. Inhwa Kim — structural vulnerability, failure-mode definitions and causes, output validation.
      1.3 The Structured Prompt
      • Wei, J. et al. (2022): Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models. NeurIPS 2022. arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903
      • White, J. et al. (2023): A Prompt Pattern Catalog to Enhance Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT. arxiv.org/abs/2302.11382
      • Anthropic: Prompt Engineering Overview. docs.claude.com
      • Expert contributions: Prof. Inhwa Kim — examples, core concepts, principles, impact areas. Shay Luo — practitioner perspective.
      1.4 Data Security
      • OWASP Foundation: OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications 2025. genai.owasp.org
      • Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR).
      • Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, in particular Article 10 (data governance) and Article 50 (transparency).
      • Samsung and ChatGPT, 2023: contemporaneous reporting, including Bloomberg, 2 May 2023.
      • Anthropic: support documentation on privacy settings and retention periods. support.claude.com
      • Expert contribution: Shay Luo — real-world deployment perspective.
      1.5 Article 4 in Detail
      1.6 Documented AI Usage
      • Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, consolidated version as at 27 July 2026 — Article 12 (logging), Article 26(6) (log retention by deployers), Article 26(7) (informing workers), Article 50 (transparency obligations).
      • European Commission: AI Literacy — Questions & Answers — on internal records and the absence of any certification requirement.
      • ISO/IEC 42001:2023, Artificial intelligence — Management system, as a further reference for organisation-wide documentation standards.
      • Expert contributions: Prof. Inhwa Kim — reasons for documentation. Shay Luo — auditability in enterprise deployments.

      Where a legal provision is quoted in the chapters, the quotation marks contain the words of the Act or of the European Commission. Everything outside them is our reading of it.