When generative AI tools like ChatGPT first came out, Autumn Melcers team of copywriters and graphic designers flirted with the technology,even though many of them were scared by it.
Melcer also had mixed feelings. But she knew it was time to get into a more committed relationship with artificial intelligence when she spotted a competitor agency trumpeting how they use it in a blog post.
If theyre touting it in their blog posts, its a big marketing tool for them, said Melcer, a creative director for TrueSense Marketing, which helps nonprofits with fundraising and media campaigns. And so Im like, Hey, this is something weve got to leverage as an agency.'
Melcer said her company was already doing much of what their competitor was touting. But she still felt compelled to enroll in several AI training courses to get a firmer grip on how her company should approach the tech.
There was LinkedIns Generative AI Skills for Creative Content, which came as part of her paid subscription. There was Simplivs ChatGPT for Marketers, Content Creators and Social Media Managers for $149.
Theyre everywhere, Melcer said. I mean, every day I get a new course almost thats being advertised to me.
Melcer estimates shes spent over 10 hours on multiple webinars and paid hundreds of dollars for them in total. She has a few more lined up shes excited to attend.
She said half have been pretty good; the other half, basically a waste.
But overall, the courses have eased her AI anxiety.
Its the enemy you dont know thats the scariest, though, right? Melcer said. And thats why were going down this path.
That mix of fear and excitement about artificial intelligence has been pretty lucrative for the online upskilling industry.
In 2023, someone enrolled on Coursera in [generative] AI content every minute, said Marni Baker Stein, chief content officer for the online learning platform Coursera. Every minute of the year.
Rival online training marketplace Udemy says its had over 3 million enrollments in AI courses. It had a ChatGPT class up and running within 11 days of ChatGPTs public debut.
Courseras Baker Stein said because artificial intelligence could touch just about every industry, the training and retraining opportunities tailored to specific jobs are basically endless.
UX designer, or project manager, or attack and defense specialist in cybersecurity, Baker Stein said. All of these roles are being massively impacted by generative AI now, so existing content we have in those areas is being rethought and refurbished.
That includes roles like teacher.
Jules White is the instructor for a Coursera training called Innovative Training with ChatGPT. Hes also a computer science professor at Vanderbilt University.
A lot of what White teaches is prompt engineering, which is basically the art of crafting questions and commands to get the AI to do what you want.
This is like the most fundamentally democratizing moment in computing, where anybody can go in and they can have the power of a programmer without having to know how to program, White said.
Powerful tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney are designed to be user-friendly. So cant you just learn by doing?
White said prompt engineering really isnt as simple as it sounds there are tricks and tips to learning how to interact with artificial intelligence, even if no coding is required.
Also, most of his courses are designed to get users excited about how to amplify their own creativity with AI, not just how to automate tedious tasks, he said.
Some people learn best through a course. And so it depends on what youre learningstyle is, the way to do it, White said.
Its too early to judge how effective these courses might be in future-proofing workers, said economist Raffaela Sadun at Harvard Business School.
AI is young, she cautioned. Years from now, a course like ChatGPT for Content Creators may sound as silly as An Expert Guide to Using Your Pager. So courses should focus less on technical skills and more on broader conceptual learning.
The risk is that you learn something now, and six months from now, its already obsolete, Sadun said.
She said generative AI will require more than retraining white-collar workers how to think about their jobs; itll require retraining how they think about themselves. Take the example of a writer.
As a writer, are you going to accept that ChatGPT may provide you with some ideas, some creative ideas, and then your role is not any more to come up with these ideas, but its to select or refine ideas that were provided to you by a technology? Sadun said. And this is a very different way of doing work.
Theres a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the worlds events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
See more here:
AI fear and excitement are lucrative mix for online training industry - Marketplace
- What We Learned From Big Tech's Earnings Reports - Investopedia - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- Google Maps: It's getting a new generative AI feature - Mashable - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- Amazon made an AI bot to talk you through buying more stuff on Amazon - The Verge - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- AI creates what Europeans think Americans from every state look like and it may hurt your feelings - UNILAD - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- Samsung's Galaxy S24 Ultra Could Be Doing So Much More With AI - CNET - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- Fact Sheet: Biden-Harris Administration Announces Key AI Actions Following President Bidens Landmark Executive ... - The White House - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- Google Maps is getting supercharged with generative AI - The Verge - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- AI chatbots tend to choose violence and nuclear strikes in wargames - New Scientist - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- Police Turn to AI to Review Bodycam Footage - ProPublica - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- Apple Just Teased Its AI Plans. You Really Should Take Notice - CNET - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- AI models are coming to fashion to promote diversitybut some industry insiders are concerned it will end up parodying it - Fortune - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- In the AI science boom, beware: your results are only as good as your data - Nature.com - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- Tim Cook confirms Apple's generative AI features are coming later this year - The Verge - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- I Tried Google Bard's New AI Image Generator. Here's How It Turned Out - CNET - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- 'Year of AI' Faculty Recruitment Initiative Aims to Bring More World-Class Professors to UT - The University of Texas at Austin - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- AI Learns Through the Eyes and Ears of a Child - New York University - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- Amazon Introduces Rufus, an AI Shopping Tool, and Reports Earnings - The New York Times - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- I Tested a Next-Gen AI Assistant. It Will Blow You Away - WIRED - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- AI Actors Who Almost Got The Part - BuzzFeed - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- AI afterlife, robot romance, and slow-burn slashers: the best of Sundance 2024 - The Verge - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- Is Jumping on the AI Bandwagon Prudent? - Catholic Exchange - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- This AI learnt language by seeing the world through a baby's eyes - Nature.com - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- Arc Search's AI responses launched as an unfettered experience with no guardrails - Mashable - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- Generative AI is hot, but predictive AI remains the workhorse - CIO - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- Nvidia Stock Just Got Amazing Artificial Intelligence (AI) News From These Trillion-Dollar Tech Giants - The Motley Fool - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- AI Briefing: How Priceline and other e-commerce companies are approaching generative AI - Digiday - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- OpenAI Unveils A.I. That Instantly Generates Eye-Popping Videos - The New York Times - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- Technology industry to combat deceptive use of AI in 2024 elections - Stories - Microsoft - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- What is a deepfake? How AI scams are threatening the 2024 election - USA TODAY - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- Meeting the moment: combating AI deepfakes in elections through today's new tech accord - Microsoft On the Issues - Microsoft - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- These Are the Jobs That AI Is Actually Replacing in 2024 - Tech.co - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- AI company developing software to detect hypersonic missiles from space - SpaceNews - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- How are AI Systems Assisting Architects and Designers? - ArchDaily - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- Artificial intelligence is making critical health care decisions. The sheriff is MIA - POLITICO - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- Google's Chess Experiments Reveal How to Boost the Power of AI - WIRED - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- Why the only way to ride the company AI wave is experimentation - Big Think - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- What Are the Best AI Stocks in February 2024? Our Top 3 Picks - InvestorPlace - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- Media Buying Briefing: Agencies' AI efforts lead to aliens and Whoppers - Digiday - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- C3.ai Stock Warning: Don't Get Carried Away With AI Euphoria! - InvestorPlace - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- Google wants you to label AI-generated images used in Merchant Center - Search Engine Land - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- The State of A.I., and Will Perplexity Beat Google or Destroy the Web? - The New York Times - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- Donald Trump's father resurrected by AI to tell him he's 'a disgrace' - Euronews - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- Google Cloud CEO On Huge Investments, AI And Challenges In 2024 - CRN - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- AI Stocks: Google, Adobe Highlight Threat Even To Big Artificial Intelligence Plays. Take Note Investors. - Investor's Business Daily - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- Another Big Question About AI: Its Carbon Footprint Mother Jones - Mother Jones - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- Reddit sells training data to unnamed AI company ahead of IPO - Ars Technica - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- ChatGPT Stock Predictions: 3 Artificial Intelligence Companies the AI Bot Thinks Have 10X Potential - InvestorPlace - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- Chinese entrepreneurs express awe and fear of OpenAIs Sora video tool - South China Morning Post - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- Sanofi CEO: AI promises a great era of drug discovery that could fundamentally change medicinebut only if we allow it to deliver - Fortune - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- Google's AI Boss Says Scale Only Gets You So Far - WIRED - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- World's largest computer chip WSE-3 will power massive AI supercomputer 8 times faster than the current record-holder - Livescience.com - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- Is generative AI truly making disinformation worse? - Euronews - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- Do This Weekly To Learn About AI Investing, Says Top Trader - Investor's Business Daily - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- Your Kid May Already Be Watching AI-Generated Videos on YouTube - WIRED - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- Free Legal Research Startup descrybe.ai Now Has AI Summaries of All State Supreme and Appellate Opinions - LawSites - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- Google's new AI will play video games with you but not to win - The Verge - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- Regulators Need AI Expertise. They Can't Afford It - WIRED - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- CBP wants to use AI to scan for fentanyl at the border - The Verge - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- Rely on the Spirit when using AI, Elder Gong encourages - Church News - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- Video Game Made Purely With AI Failed Because Tech Was 'Unable to Replace Talent' - IGN - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- Among the A.I. Doomsayers - The New Yorker - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- Self-docking spacecraft could be built with AI system similar to ChatGPT - Space.com - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- AI books are crowding the marketplace on Amazon - NPR - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- Hackers can read private AI-assistant chats even though they're encrypted - Ars Technica - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- EU Presses Big Tech Companies on AI Threats - PYMNTS.com - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- AI Chips: In the AMD Vs. Nvidia Fight, Second Place Is Still A Winner - Investor's Business Daily - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- Craig Martell, the Pentagon's first-ever Chief Digital and AI Officer, to depart in April - DefenseScoop - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- Startup Interloom raises $3 million seed round to take on UiPath and RPA market - Fortune - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- Forget Chatbots. AI Agents Are the Future - WIRED - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- SXSW audience boos AI sizzle reel - Quartz - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- Which AI is best? Our tech expert put three free versions to the test - USA TODAY - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]
- Look beyond Nvidia to ride the AI wave there are other potential winners, Fidelity says - CNBC - March 15th, 2024 [March 15th, 2024]