AI FOR EVERYONE: THE HANDS-ON BEGINNER'S GUIDE

A debut primer on artificial intelligence targets nonspecialists.

Sharman’s slim guide joins an endless ocean of books intended to explain, demystify, or even domesticate the large language models and AI tools that are surging in popularity and ubiquity in seemingly every corner of society. The author, a longtime programmer and web designer, has been working with the precursors of AI for decades—and he admits immediately that he employed AI to help write this manual. “The book’s clarity comes from my programmer’s mindset,” he asserts. “Give AI clear instructions, and it becomes your partner, not a puzzle.” Oddly, on the very next page, the author refers to himself in the third person: “I wrote this book with the help of AI but its clarity and usefulness come from the vision of its author, Roland Sharman.” More importantly, the text points out that this guide isn’t about spotlight-grabbing entities like ChatGPT; every time readers use spellcheck, email sorting, or Netflix suggestions, they’re employing AI. The work provides dozens of clear, bullet-pointed tips for getting the most out of these and other iterations like chatbots, translation apps, and image generators (“Do not share private info: When using chatbots, avoid typing your full name, address, or password. Stick to fun questions or general topics”). The book also delivers intriguing success stories about people who have embraced free AI tools (“Carlos runs a food truck and wanted a fun logo but couldn’t afford a designer. He used Crayon to create images by typing ‘taco truck with bright colours.’ He picked his favourite design, tweaked it a bit, and now it is on his truck, drawing in customers daily”). The sense that AI has written part of the text is omnipresent in many of the pages. But regardless of the provenance, the guide offers too many cheerleading slogans (“Your imagination plus AI is unstoppable, and there’s more to create!”), distracting from the practical programmer’s advice dispensed throughout the book. That counsel—about clarifying input language and choosing prompts with care and specificity—is certainly helpful.

A straightforward, useful but sometimes uneven guide to the basics of working with AI.