Before last year, Jana Soldicic’s understanding of artificial intelligence was mostly limited to what she’d read on the pages of science fiction novels. But in the fall, after getting the chance to use the technology in real life as she played around with the generative AI tools ChatGPT and DALL-E, she got more curious.
“I really wanted to know what was behind it. I knew it couldn’t be magic,” Soldicic said.
She searched online and found Elements of AI, a self-paced, online course created by MinnaLearn and The University of Helsinki that provides an introduction to artificial intelligence designed for people without a background in technology, and was surprised by how much she enjoyed the course.
“I got a little bit addicted to it,” she says. “It gave me a basic understanding of what AI is now and what it could be.”
The experience gave her a deeper understanding of how artificial intelligence actually operated—far beyond what she might have learned from messing around with the publicly available programs. Now, she’s bringing that knowledge to her work as an event planner. “I now have more of an understanding what it could do for me, my work, [and] my colleagues, other than just creating texts or pictures.”
Soldicic, who is based in Hamburg, Germany, uses AI text-to-image generators like DALL-E to bring adverts and flyers to life with designs that it might have previously been impossible for her to create on her own. “We wanted little squirrels on a tandem bike for one event [flyer], and you could never find such a picture in real life. I put in ‘two squirrels on the tandem bike’ [on DALL-E] and there were so many different and cool results. I didn't have to find somebody to realize my idea, I could just do it at home.”
Continue reading: https://time.com/6302984/ai-jobs-career/