Useful sources of help on using AI tools

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Useful sources of help on using AI tools
In creating our two-day course on using AI tools we found a few sources of help particularly useful, and thought we'd take this opportunity to acknowlege them.

Posted by Andy Brown on 01 August 2024

I'm just coming to the end of creating our two-day AI Tools course (and what a journey of discovery it's been!). I thought it would be useful - and polite - to acknowledge the sources of help I turned to most:

Source of help	Notes
LinkedIn tutorial from Dave Birss	You'll probably have to pay for this (although LinkedIn do do a free month's trial). This series of tutorial videos is perfect for getting into prompt engineering (the art of writing instructions for an AI tool to follow). The videos are professionally produced, the content is excellent and Dave Birss (the presenter) has a lovely soft Scottish accent, lots of expression and a dry sense of humour. Recommended.
Medium article from Nabil Alouani	This is a member-only story, so you may have to take out a Medium subscription to read it in full (I did). My preferred style of learning is to read rather than watch, and I found this an invaluable summary of the main techniques that you can try when writing prompts for an AI tool like ChatGPT.
Art styles for images from Zapier	If you want to learn what's possible when generating images, this is the place to start. An exhaustive listing of the possibilities you can explore when generating images in tools like ChatGPT or MidJourney.

In addition to this, here are 3 blogs which I wish I'd been able to read when writing this course, but couldn't (because I hadn't written them yet!):

Blog	Details
Comparing AI text tools	A comparison of ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini to see which one can best answer each of 5 tests.
Comparing image creation tools	A comparison of ChatGPT, Copilot, Firefly, MidJourney and Stable Diffusion for 3 different tests to see which is the best AI tool to use for generating images.
(Not) understanding large language models	Many websites try to explain how the Large Language Models (LLMs) underpinning AI tools work. However the truth is that this is a futile mission; this blog explains clearly why you are wasting your time trying to understand how LLMs work.

I began writing this course an AI sceptic, but am now completely converted; I'll be using Google a lot less and ChatGPT, Copilot or Claude a lot more for my day-to-day work.

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include: