Introduction

An adventure you can begin

Imagine that a student walks into the library with an idea for something she wants to build. A website for her mother’s business. A song she has carried around in a notebook for years. A guide that could help other students make sense of a subject that initially confused her. She has heard that AI can help, but she does not yet know where to begin. What would we need to teach her?

For a while, I thought the answer would mostly involve tools. We would explain how a chatbot works, show her how to write a useful prompt, and help her evaluate the response. Those things still matter. But the more I have written, built, and taught with AI, the more I have found myself returning to questions that come before the prompt. Who is this for? What problem are you trying to solve? What would a good result look like? How would you know whether you had made something useful?

That is the journey I want this book to support. I use AI literacy to describe the understanding and critical judgment that help us make sense of these systems. I use AI fluency to describe the ability to put that understanding to work, adapting our approach as the task, the tools, and the evidence change. These are working definitions for our conversation. They overlap, and other educators organize the territory differently. Fluency does not mean that we have graduated from the need to question what a machine tells us.

The essays that follow move through academic libraries, college classrooms, music, personal experiments, and possible futures. At first, that may seem like an unusually broad itinerary. But music makes questions about authorship and value tangible. Building a website reveals the distance between getting something to run and making it useful. Libraries ask us to think about who gets access to these possibilities, who needs support, and what responsibilities accompany the opportunity.

I have kept the essays intact because the changes in my thinking are part of the story. You will encounter enthusiasm, uncertainty, and predictions that should be tested against what has happened since they were written. You may disagree with me. I hope you can use that disagreement to ask a better question, find a stronger source, or design a more revealing experiment.

You can read this book from beginning to end, or follow the subject that makes you curious. Each “Try this” is a short prompt you can copy into an AI assistant or a tool that builds websites from your instructions. Some open a conversation, some investigate what has changed, and some help you make something small enough to test. Share the relevant essay or its link when a prompt refers to it. For current-information prompts, use a tool that can search the web; if it cannot browse or open a source, ask it to say so. Open the sources yourself and try what you build. You can begin with whichever invitation meets a question of your own.

If you are an educator or librarian, you do not have to become the person who knows every tool. You can become the person who helps others begin thoughtfully, notice what they do not yet understand, and keep learning. If you are beginning this adventure for yourself, the same invitation applies. Start with something that matters to you. Make a small attempt. Look closely at the result. Then decide what you want to understand next.