Generative AI Foundations: Principles, Prompt Engineering, Ethics, and Real-World Applications

Generative AI Foundations: Principles, Prompt Engineering, Ethics, and Real-World Applications

Course overview

Generative AI can draft a lesson, a shop SOP, or a lab outline in seconds. It can also invent references, leak a private prompt to a vendor, or help someone submit work that is not theirs. This foundations course teaches you how the systems behave, how to steer them with prompts, and how to keep a human in the loop.

What you will learn

• Explain generation as next-token prediction, not as a guaranteed knowledge base.
• Control variety with ideas such as temperature and clear constraints.
• Write Role–Task–Format–Constraint prompts in English and Urdu contexts.
• Apply NIST AI RMF functions (Govern, Map, Measure, Manage) to a campus or small-business use case.
• Choose a tool family (chat, image, code) and refuse unsafe data sharing.
• Deliver a short, disclosed, human-reviewed AI workflow.

Open media

Videos include Crash Course Artificial Intelligence (typically CC BY) and Google Cloud Skills Boost introductions (free official training; original licence remains). Infographics are original course SVGs. NIST AI RMF text is a U.S. government work (public domain); the explainer is linked from NIST (Kaltura).

Who should enrol

Students, educators, and professionals with basic digital literacy. No programming is required. Programming assistants are introduced conceptually in Module 4.