Last week, we announced the launch of the ChatGPT Basics on-demand course. Our goal with this course is to help people understand where this revolutionary generative AI tool came from, what it’s all about, and ways to use it and not use it.

As a team, we’ve become convinced that in order to be highly data literate in the foreseeable future, each one of us will need to know how to interact with large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. We’ll also need to understand their problems and pitfalls. The course features a chatbot based on OpenAI’s GPT architecture, so those who take the course can actually try it out for themselves on our site without ever leaving the flow of their learning.

Today, we’re announcing the launch of the course’s companion e-book, authored by our Co-Founder and CEO Ben Jones.  The title of the book is ChatGPT Basics: Exploring Its Origins, Uses, and Misuses. This is Ben’s seventh book, and he has been immersing himself in various iterations of this tool and interfacing with industry experts and developers to learn how to use it and to deploy it on our site. He has captured his learnings to date in this short e-book of 113 pages that will take about an hour of your time to read.

In summary, Ben has discovered that LLMs hold a great deal of promise, but they also have the potential to cause great harm to individuals and to society. In this book, he lays out his own observations as well as those of others in an attempt to bring a balanced perspective into view.

The ChatGPT Basics e-book is available on Amazon for Kindle readers or on our site in pdf form for everyone else. Also, those who enroll in the course will get a free copy along with access to the course itself.

For those of you who are interested in hearing more about this tool and how it can be used, join Ben and our newest Data Literacy team member, Alli Torban for a free webinar in which they’ll share examples of fun and helpful ways they have used ChatGPT so far in their own personal lives. The webinar will be held this Friday, April 7th at 10am PT / 1pm ET, and you can register now while spaces are available!

Lastly, if you’re willing to sign up for our email distribution list, then we’ll send you a free copy of Chapter 3: ChatGPT Warnings and Caveats. In this chapter, Ben discusses and shows actual examples of interactions with both GPT-3.5 as well as the newer GPT-4 architecture that reveal a propensity for certain kinds of errors and problematic responses. Familiarize yourself with the “Don’ts” of ChatGPT first, and then you can find your way to the many “Do’s.” To receive your free pdf copy of Chapter 3 of ChatGPT Basics, just fill out the form below and we’ll send it to your inbox.