Google wants to teach you how to talk to an AI properly

With the current rise of AI in just about everything, it's easy to go blind to the term. What was once heralded as the next big thing in technology is now being thrown into your kettle for reasons only known to the product designer and their God.

Still, one of the most prominent uses for AI in the modern age is with a chatbot. Whether it's a big name like ChatGPT or one of the smaller ones used by websites and brands around the world, these things are everywhere.

Now, Google is launching an official course designed to teach people how to talk to these AI chatbots. Designed to share tips and tricks to get the most from the brand's own chatbots, the Google Prompting Essentials Course is made to help learners discover how to effectively prompt an AI in just five easy steps. The result, they say, will ensure AI works better for them, and requires no prior experience.

The course can be found on Coursera, and costs $49 (approx. £38 / AU$75). That's certainly not cheap, and will need to offer something fairly significant to entice users in.

The course comprises of four modules and twelve assignments, all of which should be completed in less than 10 hours. By the end, users should be able to adapt their emails for different audiences, summarise longer documents, brainstorm new ideas, build better presentations and receive feedback on delivery, analyse data and produce better visualisations, and use AI responsibly, by recognising biases and errors.

It should also give users a library of prompts to make use of after the course has completed, and a snazzy certificate to slap on your LinkedIn page. It's certainly an interesting concept.

One thing it does potentially highlight is that the general public are struggling to use AI chatbots effectively. There certainly are ways of getting the kind of response you're looking for out of them, but the impasse between that style of communication and our natural language can leave some out of the loop.