An AI chatbot is a program you type to in plain language. You write what you want, it writes back. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are the three most people have heard of, and all three have a free version. You will not need to pick one yet, and you will not need to pay for anything in this course.
The one idea worth keeping
The model does not know things the way a search engine or an encyclopaedia does. It has read an enormous amount of text and learned what usually comes next. That is why it is so good at writing, rephrasing and explaining, and why it can occasionally state something false in a confident, well-written sentence. Both come from the same place.
| Task | How much to trust it | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Write or rewrite a message, email or note | High, read it once before sending | Writing is what it was trained on most |
| Explain something confusing in plain words | High | It is rephrasing, not inventing |
| Summarise text you paste in | High, spot-check one detail | Everything it needs is in front of it |
| Turn messy notes into a list or a plan | High | Structure is easy for it |
| Give you a fact, a date, a price or a statistic | Low, check it | It may produce something plausible rather than true |
| Do arithmetic with several steps | Medium, check the numbers | It predicts text; it is not a calculator by default |
| Tell you about something that happened this week | Low unless it searched the web | Its knowledge stops at a training date |
Knowledge check
You ask a chatbot for the opening hours of a local shop and it answers confidently. What should you do?