Scott Kirsner's Recent LinkedIn Posts

This past Saturday, when I should have been cleaning up the yard and folding some laundry, I was instead gazing into my laptop in the kitchen, finishing up a certificate program in artificial intelligence. The set of seven online courses I took is part of a new state offering, announced last month, that's free for all Massachusetts residents. (Delivered on Coursera; the content is created by Google.) A few observations: • There's plenty of good stuff to absorb, like better approaches to prompting AI (tell it the format you’d like the output in, like a “pros and cons” table), and a recommendation to instruct the AI to ask you any follow-up or clarifying questions that would help it do a good job for you. • If you haven’t used NotebookLM yet — or haven’t used it in a while — you’ll get introduced to a really helpful Google feature that lets you feed it a large collection of information (from the web, documents on your computer, or even YouTube videos), and then presents different ways you can learn about it. Those include a podcast with realistic human voices, short videos, quizzes, or flash cards. • A capability built into the Google Gemini mobile app lets you have conversations with your phone and get coaching from the AI; you might practice a speech, or role-play a job interview or sales pitch. But... • The course only exposes you to Google's tools. • Image generation still can be unreliable. Google told me it was generating images but just served up errors. • AI still makes stuff up, and won't confess unless you press it for citations / links. • It's surprising that a major player like Google doesn't seem to be aware that a key feature of its AI Studio is broken: you can't actually publish the apps you build in it. Users have been complaining on Google's message boards, but no one seems to be paying attention, and even if you have Google's AI Pro level, I couldn't find any customer support. So I rebuilt the app I created in Lovable, which actually seems to care that you can publish what you create on that platform — and it works great. Links to the MassLive.com column, and the app I ported from Google AI Studio to Lovable, in the first comment. (cc Sabrina Mansur)