Beginner’s Guide to Generative AI Micro-Credential

Beginner’s Guide to Generative AI Micro-Credential

Duration: 2 Hours

Description

“Generative AI” gets used as a catch-all for everything from chatbots to image generators, which makes it hard to reason about what these systems can actually be trusted to do. This short session builds a real mental model: what a foundation model is, how it’s trained on data, and why the same prompt can produce a different answer twice — including a look at reasoning models that work through a problem step by step before answering, and multimodal models that generate video and voice alongside text and images. It spends real time on the two failure modes every user eventually hits — the black-box problem (not knowing why a model answered the way it did) and hallucination (confident, fluent, wrong) — so participants leave able to use these tools with realistic expectations instead of either blind trust or blanket skepticism.

Audience

This session is built for genuine beginners — no technical background, coding experience, or prior AI exposure assumed. It’s a strong starting point for anyone whose organization is adopting AI tools and wants a real foundation before their first hands-on skill-building session, rather than jumping straight into a specific tool without understanding what’s actually happening underneath it.

Objectives

  • Define what generative AI is and differentiate it from other types of AI
  • Explain the basic principles of how generative and reasoning models work
  • Recognize and describe today’s landscape of generative AI models, including reasoning and multimodal systems
  • Identify a variety of real-world applications for generative AI

Prerequisites

No prior technical knowledge is required.

Related AI Courses

See the full AI training roadmap and course directory for how this fits into a broader learning path.

For a deeper, business-oriented version of these fundamentals, see Demystifying Generative AI. Ready to start applying this to your own prompts? Continue with Prompt Engineering 101 Micro-Credential. Curious about the fairness and accountability side of these systems? See AI Ethics and Bias Micro-Credential.

Course Outline

Module 1: What is Generative AI?

  • AI in a Nutshell
  • The Magic of Generative AI
  • Generative vs. Discriminative AI
  • Lab – Explore AI-Generated Text, Images, and Music

Module 2: The Core Concepts

  • Data is the Key
  • Foundation Models, and What “Reasoning” Adds
  • The Role of Prompts
  • The Black Box Problem
  • Lab – Generative AI with Different Prompts

Module 3: Real World Applications and Ethics

  • Beyond Chatbots: Multimodal and Video Generation
  • The Hallucination Problem
  • Responsible Use