Book Review: 101 Things You Must Know Today About ChatGPT and Generative AI

Lasse Rouhiainen is a leading authority on AI. His first book 101 Things You Must Know Today About Our Future from 2018 provided a comprehensive overview of AI's potential to change our lives. In this second book of the series, he focuses specifically on ChatGPT, a generative AI tool that has become readily available to all users. These are tools that will revolutionize every industry, change business processes, and accelerate innovation.

101 Things You Must Know Today About ChatGPT and Generative AI was published independently on July 1, 2024. Victory Editing, a NetGalley Co-op, provided an early galley for review.

Before I changed careers at fifty and became a librarian, my previous profession was in software development and support. I had been coding in one form or another since high school. When ChatGPT came on the scene in recent years, I dabbled around with it for fun - mostly using it as a sounding board for my amateur writing and tabletop role-playing game scenario creations. I found it to be a lot of fun and very powerful. For those reasons, I wanted to check out Rouhiainen's book.

From the table of contents alone, the reader will see how he has organized these various informational lessons across ten broad topic areas. For the novices, he outlines an introduction to these concepts and then focuses on the impacts they will have in ten specific industries. Then, there is a focus on how these tools will change business processes, including some sample prompts for users to try themselves. Image creation and data analysis are the next focuses. And still only covers the first sixty things. There is so much more here.

Any concerns I had of this being overly technical or textbook dry went away instantly. With straight-forward, everyday language, Rouhiainen provides a starting roadmap to using these tools through concrete examples and suggestions. He even includes sample prompts to start diving into this approach to getting work done.

As I am not a business user specifically, I still very much derived benefits out of the "frequently asked questions on prompting" section. These are great tips that can help any user no matter what their reasons are for employing the tool.