AI for Seniors: Beginner-Friendly introduction to AI. Lesson 1: What is AI?

0:00 Hey there, and welcome to AI for Seniors, the series where I teach you everything you need to know about AI and show you how you can use it in your daily life for your work or just for fun. This is specifically made for seniors. We're going to take it slow, and we're only going to learn what we

0:17 really need to know. Nothing complicated, just what it takes to get you to a place where you can be comfortable with AI. And this is video number one. What is AI? Just to get started, who am I? My name is Koresh. You can call me K, and I built an accessibility tool for my dad. Now, my dad's an older guy. My users are

0:39 older people, and I speak to them on a daily basis, and over time I saw how little information there is out there for seniors to learn how to properly use this amazing new technology that exists. So, I use AI every single day, and in this series my goal is to kind of get you to a place where you can also use it

0:59 every single day if you want to. And if you don't want to, at least you'll know a little bit more about it and can use it when you need it. Let's get started with the basics. What even is AI? And first we're going to talk about the right but slightly boring version of it. So, very simply said, AI is a computer

1:16 program that does things that usually require human thinking, such as answering questions, writing messages, or finding information for you online. The AI bots that we use on a daily basis are trained on the [music] entirety of the internet. So, anything that was ever written and published on the internet,

1:34 the AI knows about because it's been trained [music] on it. So, let's see how that works right now. For example, I'm going to go to ChatGPT, which is one of the most standard AI sites out there, and it's a chatbot. And I'm just going to say, "Write me an email about how much you love me and write it in the style of

1:54 Ernest Hemingway." There we go. I click on enter, and then the AI gets to work and and it will do that for me. There we go. Now, we don't need to dive deeper into this right now. I'm going to have another video specifically around how to use ChatGPT, but for now, what we see is I just gave

2:12 it a very random task and it managed to perform that task. It wrote an email and it is in fact in the style of Ernest Hemingway. So, now this might seem crazy, like a crazy bit of technology, but in reality, it's just super powered auto complete. And auto complete is something that you have

2:34 probably used on your phone. >> [music] >> So, if you ever write anything on your phone, whether it's a text message or a comment on Facebook, what you will see is whenever you type in a word, your phone will give you suggestions on what the next word is. So, for example, if you type in TR in the chat, your phone

2:56 will give you the auto complete option saying that you probably are trying to write the word tree. Or if you write the word how, the auto complete on your phone will give you the suggestions for are or is as the next word, because those are the most common words that appear after how.

3:19 So, how are you? How is this done? The AI is basically the same, but just super powered. It doesn't make up any information on the spot, but it can access all of this information that it was trained on on the internet to have a best guess for what the next word should be after you ask it a question. So, if

3:47 you ask it, is the sky blue, then rather than thinking about whether the sky is actually blue or not, it will access all of its training information and see what the next common words are after someone on the internet has asked, is the sky blue? And in that case, it will just know the answer is yes. That's it. The

4:07 truth is though, you don't even really need to know this. I don't think most of the people who use AI really well on a daily basis >> [music] >> need to know this or even do know this. Moving on. Let's talk about what AI is, but now with the helpful but slightly wrong version. So, everyone will always tell

4:28 you to not think of an AI as a human, but I personally find it far easier to understand if you think of it as a human. Think of an AI as your own personal assistant that has essentially read the entire internet. It has read everything. It has all of the information out there and it is your

4:47 personal assistant. It's, of course, not human. It's a computer program, >> [music] >> but it has very similar flaws to humans as well. [music] So, for example, AI makes mistakes. Humans make mistakes. Your personal assistant will make mistakes. And additionally, the AI really wants you to like it. So,

5:08 whenever you use AI and you, for example, say, "No, what you said is wrong." It will say, "No, you're absolutely right. Of course, what I said was wrong." Even if what the AI said was absolutely right. It tries to please you. It tries to make you like it, just like your subordinate personal assistant

5:25 would, right? So, is it a human? No, obviously not, but it acts like a human every now and then where it makes mistakes, it has flaws, and it's much easier to understand how to use it properly if you think of it as a human as well. But we're going to get to that in the later videos. So, why do we even

5:46 care about [music] AI? Let's do a very quick history lesson. In 2022, we got this tweet over here by someone called Sam Altman, who is the CEO of OpenAI, probably the largest AI company out there, and also the makers of ChatGPT that we played around with. And he just

6:11 said, "Today we launched ChatGPT, try talking with it here." So, back then, he just gave us a link, we went to that chatbot, and suddenly we had our own personal assistant who was trained on the entirety of the internet, and everyone's mind was blown. [music] Fast forward to 2026, where we are now

6:29 as of recording this video, and we just got this headline: 20,000 job cuts at Meta, Microsoft, and all of it because of the AI-driven labor crisis. So, how do we get here? How do we get from AI as a fun alternative to Google search or Wikipedia, because you can ask it a question about information to find, and

6:52 it will give you that information, to now AI is replacing millions of jobs across the globe? To better understand this, let's look at what some AI tools can do. And these are some very simple examples. So, we have ChatGPT, the chatbot that I just showed you. We also have Claude, which is an alternative to

7:12 ChatGPT, which some people like more, and we're going to get into that again in later videos. >> [music] >> So, these tools can do research and data analysis. They can do a lot more, but essentially what it boils down to is research and data analysis. Every company has people in there who are just

7:32 employed [music] to find numbers on the internet, to do Google searches, to get information for the next board presentation. Well, if you don't need that person anymore, then you don't really need to hire those entry-level researchers anymore, right? Of course, these aren't scientific

7:50 researchers, but standard researchers at company. Now, secondly, we [music] have a tool called Cursor, which allows you to write code with AI. And it is amazing at writing code with AI. Does this replace a senior engineer who's been on the job for 30 years? Absolutely not. Does it replace an entry-level graduate

8:12 engineer who can't even code as well as the AI and needs a higher salary and takes days off and gets sick? I don't know. That's difficult. Let's move on to >> [music] >> Nano Banana, which is Google Gemini's image generation model. It can create images. It can create images beautifully, right? [music]

8:36 So, all of those designers who were working in Photoshop and who were creating all of these brand images that companies need for their marketing, what do they do now, right? And finally, apart from these major tools that we have that everyone knows about, we also have thousands of tools who handle very,

8:55 very specialized cases of using AI. For example, we have a tool here called Voicey, which is my tool, actually. And what it does is it gives you access to super accurate voice-to-text [music] dictations on your computer. Now, this might not sound like something huge, but there's hundreds and thousands

9:19 of people out there whose entire job is to transcribe text manually. What happens to that? And this won't stop. AI just gets better all the time, all the time, at an incredible pace. All right? Just let me show you one example here. These are two head screenshots from press releases. One of them is from

9:42 March 5, 2026. The other one is from April 23. So, a month and a half apart. This is from the company OpenAI that has ChatGPT that I showed you earlier. And what they said is we're introducing GPT-5.4, which means we're introducing version 5.4 of our AI bot, and it is the most amazing new AI bot that you could ever

10:05 use. A month and a half later, they introduce GPT-5.5, which is now their most amazing bot ever. >> [music] >> Within a month and a half, they made their old product essentially useless because they implemented a new one, which is much better. All right? Now, this is happening at an incredible pace.

10:27 And this isn't just happening because OpenAI is such a hard-working company. It's happening because there's 40 different companies out there building AI bots that just beat each other on a daily basis. If ChatGPT releases a new version, another company will release an even better version next week.

10:47 Therefore, ChatGPT has to catch up, catch up, catch up. So, every 6 months, essentially, it becomes twice as good as it used to be. It is really, really difficult to bet against technology that just gets better all the time. Now, let's move on to how we should think about this. So, if a single human

11:08 now with the power of AI can do twice as much work as they could without AI, do we then fire half of our employees because productivity doubled? So, we just keep productivity as it was by firing half of everyone? Or do we do just twice as much? So, I don't know what the answer to that is, but

11:27 historically, it has always been the latter. So, when the new computer was introduced, when the first ever computer was introduced, or when spreadsheets online were Did accountants lose their job? Did we do less accounting? Not really. We didn't do that. We just had to learn how to do accounting better and

11:47 faster. But, again, we don't know if that's going to be the case here as well. But, what do we do with all of this information? I think, honestly, the best thing that you can do is learn how to use AI. Simply because, honestly, it can be fun to use it. It's new technology. It is groundbreaking. It can

12:08 make a difference to your life. It has very, very bad things in it, as well, of course. People are losing their jobs. It's terrible. But, once something this powerful has been put out there in the world, it's not in the nature of humans to just say, "Okay, let's put it in a vault and never touch it again." So,

12:26 overall, let's get to the summary of everything we talked about in this video. AI can do tasks that previously required human thinking. It's trained on the entirety of the internet. It's not human, but it has very similar flaws. We can use AI for research, writing, creating images, videos, and much more.

12:44 And it gets better nearly every single day. This was very theoretical and like with a lot of information about the past and how we got to where we are now today. [music] But, the next videos are going to be much more tactical. We're going to see how we can use AI to write emails, to create images, to do videos

13:04 for us, and in all other places in our lives. If you have any specific questions, or you want me to do any specific video, then just drop it in the comments. If you want to reach out to me directly, my email is going to be in the comments, as well, and a link to the slides will be there, as well. Thank

13:22 [music] you so, so much. And if you have any feedback on how you want me to change the style of these videos, please do share them with me. Please leave a like and subscribe and see you next time. Bye-bye.