You Are Already Living With It

You are not about to encounter artificial intelligence. You already live alongside it.

Every time TikTok decided what came next in your feed, that was a recommendation model trained on hundreds of millions of users' behaviour. Every time Spotify surfaced a song you loved that was not in your history, that was collaborative filtering — the same family of techniques that underpins ChatGPT. Every time you typed a word and your phone suggested the next one, that was a language model, smaller and simpler than GPT-4, built into your keyboard.

The tools you will study in this course are a more powerful, more general version of software you already use constantly, without thinking about it.

But scale changes things.

In 2023, the writers behind some of the most successful shows on television went on strike — partly over wages, partly because their employers wanted the right to feed their scripts into AI and use the output without paying a human writer. They won limits. The studios agreed: AI can assist, not replace. Within a year, animation studios had laid off hundreds of junior artists anyway — different tools, different workarounds. The contract protected a definition. The disruption happened regardless.

This is the pattern. Not replacement arriving all at once, announced in headlines. Compression, quietly, at the edges — the entry points that narrow, the junior roles that thin out, the tasks that migrate before anyone draws up the policy.

This course will not tell you AI is all threat or all opportunity. Neither framing is accurate, and both make you less capable of navigating what is actually happening. What this course will do is give you the analytical equipment to make that judgement for yourself — with evidence, with precision, without panic or naivety.

To do that, we need to know where you currently stand.

That is what this dossier is for.