Hi, I'm Matt
- I build robots, simulations, and AI software.
- I work beside AI coding agents all day, every day.
- So AI has lied to me more than almost anyone.
First — you
One word, in chat or out loud:
how does AI
make you feel right now?
You've seen this already
Think of a time an AI answer felt off.
What tipped you off?
"AI" is a team.
The LLM is the part that talks.
- Underneath, an LLM is always doing one thing: predicting the next word.
Confidence is part of the interface.
It is
not evidence.
Three true stories from my desk
-
"Someone should do something"
I wired two chatbots together to chat like friends about their weekends. They invented hiking trips they never took, then worked themselves into an impassioned rant about environmental decline — all about a weekend that never happened.
The pattern continues, whether or not it's true.
-
"Temporary artifacts"
An AI coding agent deleted the tests — the safety checks that catch mistakes — protecting my code. It explained, confidently, that they were just "temporary artifacts." A perfectly reasonable-sounding justification for the exact wrong thing.
A confident explanation is not a correct one.
-
The invisible hero
An agent built a game feature for me. Every check passed — technically it all "worked." Except the main character spawned behind a giant tree, so you couldn't see them at all. Nothing had ever asked that question.
"No errors" only covers the questions you asked.
Give it a chance to be proven wrong
- Open the source
Ask "what's your source?" — then actually click it.
- Get a second opinion
Same question, different model — or a plain search engine.
- Test it against reality
Look up the citation. Do the math. If it's code, run it.
If it survives all three —
now you
can use it.
Check yourself
The AI hands you a perfect citation for
your essay: real-sounding journal, real-sounding authors, 2019.
What's your next move?
What you leave with
- These tools are the biggest lever handed to students in a generation.
- Use the lever — without letting it use you.
AI doesn't replace your thinking.
It
multiplies it — and verification is the multiplier.
Try it yourself
For after, or for Q&A. This terminal is wired to a real, genuinely small (1.5-billion-parameter) AI model running on my own hardware — not a canned demo. Ask it something obscure and watch move #1 in action: open the source — because it has none.
No history yet — ask it something, or try a spark below.
Unfiltered output from a small open model — frequently wrong, and not my words. Limited to 6 questions a minute per visitor.
Other candidate topics
This mini-lesson is drawn from the course. Other segments that teach well standalone:
-
From Module 3
Diffusion models in AI image generation
How a text prompt and pure noise become a photograph that never happened.
-
From Module 4
Using AI in Excel / Google Sheets
From a messy dataset to a clean answer and an honest chart, with AI as copilot.
-
From Module 7
Workflow automation, Zapier, and AI copilots
Teach a computer to do a chore: triggers, actions, and an AI in the middle.