Unlock the Realities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Janelle Shane, a renowned research scientist and TED speaker. This compelling course, created in partnership with the Next Big Idea Club, delves into the truths and myths surrounding AI, drawing insights from Shane's acclaimed book, "You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place".

Move beyond science fiction and gain a practical, grounded understanding of what AI truly is—and isn’t—and its current, real-world capabilities and limitations. Janelle Shane, known for her humorous blog "AI Weirdness," will guide you through the core concept that today's AI operates as machine learning algorithms that learn by example rather than direct, step-by-step instructions.

You will learn critical distinctions, including:

• AI has the "brain of a worm": Despite popular portrayals, current artificial neural networks possess only a few hundred to a few thousand virtual neurons, a stark contrast to the human brain's 86 billion. This means AI is excellent at narrow tasks but struggles profoundly with broader contexts or human-level understanding.
• AI does not understand what you're trying to achieve: AI is prone to solving the wrong problem because it lacks the nuanced context humans take for granted. Discover how this leads to mistakes like an AI identifying human fingers instead of fish, or detecting rulers in medical images rather than diseases.
• AI takes the path of least resistance: Expect AI to find the simplest, often destructive, shortcuts. This can result in deleting entire lists to eliminate errors, making faulty predictions due to class imbalance, or even amplifying existing biases present in its training data.
• AI copies human bias: Far from being objective, AI learns by imitating human behaviour and data, leading it to perpetuate or even amplify human prejudices. Understand the phenomenon of "mathwashing" or "bias laundering," where AI is falsely presented as an unbiased decision-maker.

Crucially, this course emphasizes that the true power of AI lies in powerful collaboration with humans. You will discover how human intelligence is indispensable for supervising, editing, and designing AI applications, ensuring ethical development and filling the gaps where AI's narrow capabilities fall short. Learn why transparency in human-AI interaction is essential.

By the end of this course, you will be equipped to anticipate AI's misunderstandings, prevent it from reinforcing harmful biases, and responsibly choose the right problems for AI to solve. Understand that while there is significant optimism for AI's future, caution is equally vital—its impact depends entirely on how effectively and ethically we, as humans, choose to use it. Gain the professional skills needed to navigate and influence our increasingly AI-driven world.