Straight answers

It's the assumption. The free course starts from genuinely nothing — it walks you through installing the app, one tap at a time, including checking you've got the real one and not a copy. If you can send a text message, you're fine.

No. There's nothing to configure, no settings to get right, and nothing you can break. The whole app is one box that you type into.

No — and this comes up more than anything else. There was no announcement and no lesson. It arrived in about eighteen months and everyone started talking about it as though it were obvious. You haven't missed anything; there just wasn't a class to miss.

Any of the three, and all of them are free to start. The courses use ChatGPT because it's the one most people have heard of, but everything works identically on the other two. Nothing is wasted if you switch later.

No. All three have proper free versions, and they're all you need for everything in these courses. There are paid tiers; you don't need one, possibly ever. If something is telling you that you must pay to try AI, treat it as a scam — that's covered in Lesson 4.

Actually free, and actually complete. Four lessons, about thirty minutes. By the end you're set up on your phone and laptop, you've used it for something real, and you know the safety rules. Plenty of people will stop there and be perfectly well served — that's a good outcome, not a failure.

No. The lessons are just there on the site — nothing is gated. You can send me your email if you'd like the printable cheat sheet, but you can also just read and print it here without telling me anything.

It's better if you do — Lesson 1 contains the one idea the rest depends on, and Lesson 2 gets you set up so that 3 and 4 make sense. But nothing stops you jumping about.

Yes.

Depth, mostly, and a lot more ground. Seven modules and 34 lessons: reading letters, contracts, insurance documents and medical leaflets; writing complaints, difficult personal messages, condolences and speeches; everyday things like trips, food, gifts and hobbies; a full module on work — CVs, applications, interviews, running something small; and a module on making it a habit rather than something you tried once.

Yes — there's a complete lesson on the course page, exactly as it appears in the course, with nothing removed.

No. One payment, once, and it's yours. Nothing renews and there's nothing further to buy.

Written. You read at your own pace, skip back easily, and can do a lesson in five minutes on your phone. No videos to sit through and no schedule to keep up with.

Each lesson is about five minutes to read and five to do. Some people work through it in a couple of evenings; most spread it over a few weeks, a lesson at a time. There's no prize for rushing.

Email me within 30 days and I'll refund you. There's no form and I won't ask you to justify it.

The apps change constantly; the skills don't. Almost all of the course is about how to ask, how to check and how to judge — which holds whichever tool you're using.

Joe Brookes — me. I'm an MSc Artificial Intelligence expert, which mostly means I spent a long time learning how this technology genuinely works before trying to explain it to anyone. More here.

Safe enough, if you know three things — and Lesson 4 of the free course covers all three. In short: don't type anything you wouldn't write on a postcard; check anything that matters, because it can be confidently wrong; and don't rely on it to judge your own ideas, because it agrees with you too readily.

Yes — anything you type goes to the company's computers and is attached to your account. Depending on your settings it may be used to improve the system, and in some circumstances a person could read it. That's why the postcard rule exists. Module 2 of the full course goes through this properly.

No, and I wouldn't claim it. They'll make you competent and confident with a tool that will save you a few hours a week and take some awkward things off your list. That's a smaller promise than you'll see elsewhere, and it has the advantage of being true.

If you send it to me for the cheat sheet, I send you the cheat sheet. I don't sell it, pass it on, or add you to anything you didn't ask for.

Both are being written. I'd rather finish them properly than announce a date I then miss — send me a note and I'll tell you when each one's ready.

Around £30 each is the expectation, since they're bigger and more specialised. Same principle though: one payment, yours to keep.