Pam Baker has written a very useful resource for AI beginners and experts alike. Don’t let the “Dummies” title fool you into thinking otherwise. This is also a book that is hard to get your hands around – in that respect it mirrors what GenAI itself is like. Think of it as a practical tutorial into how to incorporate GenAI into your working life to make you a more productive and potent human. It is also not a book that you can read in some linear front-to-back sense: there are far too many tips, tricks, strategies and things to think about as you move through your AI journey. But it is a book that is absolutely essential, especially if you have been frustrated at learning how to better use AI.

Underlying it all is Baker’s understanding on what the winning formula for using GenAI is – to understand that the output from the computer sounds like a human. But to be really effective, the human must think like a machine and tell GenAI what you want with better prompt engineering. (She spends an entire chapter on that subject with lots of practical suggestions that combine the right mix of clarity, context and creativity.  And so you will find out there is a lot more depth to this than you think.) “You must provide the vision, the passion, and the impetus in your prompts,” Baker writes. Part of that exploration is understanding how to best collaborate with GenAI. To that end, she recommends starting with a human team to work together as moderators in crafting prompts and refining the results from the GenAI tool.” The more information the AI has, the more tailored and sophisticated the outputs will be,” she writes.

To that end, Baker used this strategy to create this very book and was the first such effort for its publisher Wiley. She says it took about half the time to write this, when compared to other books that she has written on technology. This gives the book a certain verisimilitude and street cred. This doesn’t mean ripping the output and setting it in type: that would have been a disaster. Instead, she used AI to hone her research and find sources, then go to those citations and find out if they really exist, adding to her own knowledge along the way. “It really sped up the research I needed to do in the early drafts,” she told me. “I still used it to polish the text in my voice. And you still need to draft in chunks and be strategic about what you share with the models that have a public internet connection, because I didn’t want my book to be incorporated into some model.” All of this is to say that you should use AI to figure out what you do best and that will narrow down the most appropriate tools to use to eliminate the more tedious parts.

Baker makes the point that instead of wasting effort on trying to use GenAI to automate jobs and cut costs, we should use it to create rather than eliminate. It is good advice, and her book is chock full of other suggestions on how you can find the sweet spot for your own creative expressions. She has an intriguing section on how to lie to the model to help improve your own productivity, what she calls a “programming correction.” The flip side of this is also important, and she has several suggestions on how to prevent models from generating false information.

She catalogs the various GenAI vendors and their GenAI tools into how they craft different text, audio and visual outputs, and then summarizes several popular uses, such as in generating photorealistic artworks from text descriptions, some of which she has included in this book. She also explodes several AI myths, such as AI will take over the world or lead towards massive unemployment. She has several recommendations on how to stay on top of AI developments, including continuously upskill your knowledge and tools, become more agile to embrace changes in the field, have the right infrastructure in place to run the models, and keep on top of ethical considerations for its use.

By way of context, I have known Baker for decades. We were trying to figure out when we first began working together, and both our memories failed us. Over time, one of us has worked for the other in numerous projects, websites and publications. She is an instructor for LinkedIn Learning, and has written numerous books, including another “Dummies” book on ChatGPT.