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. 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