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. 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 models work
- Recognize and describe the most common types of generative AI models
- 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. Descriminative AI
- Lab – Explore AI-Generated Text, Images, and Music
Module 2: The Core Concepts
- Data is the Key
- Foundation Models
- The Role of Prompts
- The Black Box Problem
- Lab – Generative AI with Different Prompts
Module 3: Real World Applications and Ethics
- Beyond Chatbots
- The Hallucination Problem
- Responsible Use