Online or in print, you can’t avoid all the hype around the new AIs like ChatGPT. They are going to take over the world! But first, they are going to replace lawyers, doctors, accountants, marketing departments, scriptwriters... and on... Or maybe... they are yet another tool that will help – in powerful ways - but not replace any of those groups or replace you. In fact, they are already helping in many fields and have been before all the press coverage started. But they are also getting people into trouble. And they can get you into trouble or hurt your business results if you don’t understand their limits and uses.

You will learn how they can get people into trouble, so you will have a better chance of avoiding that. And you will learn a few basic ways they can be used, after all, to help you with your small business. If you can, please bring a laptop or tablet so you can set up a free ChatGPT account (if you don’t have one) and can tailor some of the class examples to your own business interests. However, a computer is not required to benefit from the class – we will be running examples and results on the projector screen as well.

This is not a technical class. We will not get into APIs and will only talk about the model parameters as part of showing, in a non-technical way, how the models work. We will also not debate whether they will replace all those professional groups “in a few years” because a) they won’t because they can’t by their very nature and b) we’re going to spend the class time talking about how small business owners can safely and productively use the tools today.