Ai Kindergarten 101

AI Kindergarten 101 – Start Here If You’re New to AI

In this episode of Papa D’s Corner, we slow things down and go back to the basics.

After a real conversation with a smart, successful friend who had never even heard of ChatGPT, it hit me—there are a lot of people out there who feel like AI is moving fast… but they’re not even sure where to begin.

So this is AI Kindergarten.

No technical jargon. No complicated explanations. Just a simple, real-world introduction to what AI is, where to find it, and how it can actually help you in everyday life.

We talk about:

•  What AI tools like ChatGPT actually do 
•  How to access them (phone apps, websites, and more) 
•  Why you don’t need to be intimidated by AI 
•  Real-life uses—from business ideas to cooking dinner to fixing everyday problems 

If you’ve ever felt like AI is something “other people understand,” this episode is for you.

👉 Think of this as your first step into a much bigger world—explained in plain English.

🎧 Listen now and take your first step into AI—no experience required.

#AIKindergarten #ArtificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #AIBasics #PapaDsCorner #TechMadeSimple #EverydayAI

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

I was at the local tavern not too long ago and m met a buddy of mine for a drink, and we often talk about politics, artificial intelligence, and other technology and so forth. And I was really surprised to learn that my friend, who is a pretty savvy person in a lot of ways, uh had never heard or didn't know what Chat GPT is or groc. We've talked about AI and he's had lots of conversations with me and is says he's he knows that there is artificial intelligence, but something as basic as Chat GPT. So that got me to thinking that I need to back up a little bit instead of being so deep into explaining how I'm creating autonomous agents with open claw and a hostinger and all these other technical terms. I'm gonna back up and we're going to start a class called AI Kindergarten. And that's what this episode is all about. The very basics, as if you know nothing. So you've heard of artificial intelligence and you think you know what it is, but you're not really sure, and you've not even heard of Chat GPT, or you've heard of Chat GPT and Grok and Claude and some of these other uh AI chatter boxes, but you don't know what it is. You've not used it, and you in fact you you're a little concerned, you're afraid that maybe one day these AI uh creatures are going to take over the world, and maybe so. But I will say this I've gotten an enormous amount of benefit from using artificial intelligence. Uh my productivity and my insurance business has increased dramatically without having to, well, I am working harder, uh, but that's because there's a lot more business. The um but my hobbies, though, have really uh taken off. I created a cartoon series based on bedtime stories that I used to tell my children, and now I tell my grandchildren, and I made my grandchildren the hero of the stories. You can watch this for free on YouTube. It's my series is called Me and You and Kalamazoo. And uh it's me telling bedtime stories, but AI helped me make that tremendously now. And and I wrote a subsequent uh series of children's books based on the cartoon series. Before you start sending me hate, hateful comments uh because you are a content creator and you're opposed to artificial intelligence being making content. I want you to know something. These stories are my stories. I created the stories uh with real intelligence, if you want to call what I have that. And uh, but I used AI to help me illustrate. And even there, I was a very active role. Basically, what I did is I started out with Chat GPT, that is a the very first uh artificial intelligence uh chat box or chatter box or whatever you want to call it. And the reason why they call it a chatter box is because it can chat with you, and historically, Chat GPT hasn't really been able to physically do anything, it doesn't have any hands or anything like that, it can only give you information and have a conversation with you. Uh, and though those roles are expanding, though, and we'll get into that later. But uh I would start out by telling my story using voice to text inside of Google Docs. If you open up a Google Doc, there's actually an option where you can do voice dictating, and to me, that's easier for me to tell a story than it is to uh write it. Of course, I'm a pretty decent writer too. I've written a few books, but telling the stories works better for me, and so I would just tell it, let the Google Docs capture my words and put it in a text, and then I would paste that into with ChatGPT's dialog box and ask ChatGPT to create an outline for a storyboard for me to create a video based on the story. And so that I would the outline would come back and I would have it downloaded into a Word document. Chat GPT can do that for you, by the way. And by the way, if you are interested in experiencing Chat GPT for yourself, you can go to the web to um their website, just go to internet search and type in Chat GPT, or you can download an app on your phone and there is a free version and just start out by introducing yourself and say, Um, tell me what you can do. Talk to it like a person, and um, that's how you'll get the best results. There are other chat boxes, for example. Elon Musk, his company created one called Grok, and I use Grok as well. The different you'll learn if you get into this and uh use different uh AI models. That's what we refer to. Uh, ChatGPT and Grok are AI models. Uh, and there's Claude as one of the newer ones, and there are others, Gemini and so forth. Um, you'll find that they have different personalities, and the reason why they have different personalities is because the engineers that design them design them in different ways. They all have biases. For example, uh Chat GPT is is um has a lot of guardrails up, it's real sensitive about uh protecting you from something that could get you in trouble legally if you for uh if you if it thinks you're doing something that might violate copyright laws or anything like that. Um and sometimes that can be a bad thing. Uh Grok has few, if any, censors. Elon Musk, as you might know, he's not really a Democrat, and he's not really a Republican, he's really a libertarian. And quite frankly, that's what I mostly identify as. I'm a liber, I'm a Republican voting libertarian, if you are interested in knowing. But um, and basically um Grok doesn't have those guardrails up. Uh Grok can say things and give you more of an honest opinion in my you know, my mind. Um, but anyway, so I started, I took my outline, and then the next thing I did, and this is all a couple of years ago when I first started deciding I wanted to convert my stories into videos um for my child grandchildren. So I went and did a little bit of internet search and looked for different AI software programs, and next thing you know, you're getting bombarded with advertisements and solicitations, emails everywhere you look. And I bought into a couple early on. Uh I was skeptical because um I wasn't sure if I was buying something that was a ripoff or not. I did actually buy into one that was a ripoff. I'll tell you about that later. But I bought into one called Magic Light, and I still use Magic Light. And what you'll also learn, by the way, when you buy into these things, they all have their strengths and weaknesses. So I purchased Magic Light. Now, Magic Light requires a subscription, an annual subscription. And when I first bought it and I put my very first story scripts in there, the way it works with Magic Light, you load your script in and it will take your script and convert it into a storyboard, a bunch of images, you know, anywhere from 30 to 60 images, depending on how long your story is. And then you can um animate those individual shots, is what Magic Light calls them, uh, or the images, and they will animate. When I've at in the very beginning, the animation was terrible. Their quality of their pictures are very good. If you do Pixar style cartoon, 3D cartoons like I do, the renderings are absolutely beautiful. The colors, the depth, the shadows, really fantastic. Um, but initially their characters weren't consistent, they would change from scene to scene, and then weird things would happen, like their head would spin around backwards, or they would dissolve. It just really was very not real good. Um, so I looked and bought another one. Now, this next one was called Video Express, and this one I was really skeptical about because they advertised you can buy this program with one time fee, and it was a hundred and something dollars. I don't remember the amount now, but it was so low it was worth a risk because they said there's no renewal fees. You pay this, you own it, and there's no subscription fees to renew it, and you have unlimited usage, you don't have a set number of tokens like Magic Lite does. Now, the tokens or the uh credits that you get with Magic Lite are huge. I you it I create a lot of uh content with Magic Lite and never ran out, and uh but with Video Express it's unlimited, and and Video Express has uh image creators, you can do um uh video, you can you can start with a text, a prompt, and type in and say, I would like to have um the um uh make an image with this prompt, or you can type in there to make a video with this prompt. A prompt is is our that that's your instructions. And I use Chat GPT to help me write prompts, by the way. That works really well, uh, even when I'm using these prompts and other software programs, that has helped me tremendously. Um, but Magic Lite has unlimited usage, and it's turned out to be a fantastic buy. The videos that it produces are in 4K, which compared to almost everything else out there is 1080. Uh and um and this unlimited usage, and they and and they it it has the ability to create human talking videos, in other words, it does lip syncing, you can upload your own recording for voice and so forth and so by anyway. Bottom line is the video express has been a tremendous purchase, and you get free upgrades, they're constantly making it better and adding uh more services and better quality, and and it doesn't cost anymore. They don't send you an email and say, hey, you need to upgrade to this newer version, it's better. It just keeps on getting better. I don't know if I per I think I may have been one of their first uh purchases or uh customers. Uh their company's based out of Pakistan, and I was a little bit leery about that. I thought, oh, am I going to am I giving a Pakistani company my credit card information and they're sending me some bogus stuff? Turns out it's been really good. You can communicate with them uh through customer service and send them a message in English and it comes back in English. Uh they do training videos, and what I've discovered about them is these are actually genuine people who are truly interested in making quality products and getting good service. So they're they're actually good people. Uh Magic Lite, I sent an email to Magic Lite and said, you have a really good project product, your images are fantastic, but your rendering is not so good, your animation rather is not so good. And also, you should add voice cloning uh and uh and and uh allow us to upload our own characters so that we can have consistent characters. Oh, guess what? I don't know if they did it because of my email. They did respond and said thank you for these uh suggestions. Well, a year later, guess what? It's gotten a whole lot better. They have partnered with some of the better known, some of the better known AI video generators. Um, I'll throw some names out and you probably uh wonder uh if you if in if you're in kindergarten uh AI right now, these won't mean anything to you. But as you begin to try these different programs and making videos, you'll discover that some are significantly better than others, some are better at doing certain types of things than others. But you'll hear about cling and Haleo U. I don't know if I even pronounce that right, but they're really good. Uh, Seed Dance and a whole bunch of others, and the a lot of these others that have gotten a um a lot of publicity and they're charging a premium really aren't any better than uh Magic Lite or or Video Express in many regards. And like I said, a video express, in fact, video express is the only one I know of that makes 4K renderings. Uh so I would say that was a really good purchase. Um, so next thing I have is a storyboard and Magic Lite, and I will tell it to animate, and the animations uh are much better than they were before, but there's still a lot to um go on. They also even have a way to upload your voices, and and what I mean by that is my characters, I I have a I have set voices for them in my uh stories. I'm the narrator, and um, and I try not to be in there as a character very much, uh, very rarely. But my grandsons, for example, are characters in there, and uh I had to come up with a voice for them, and there is a program called 11 Labs, and you can do an internet search and pull that up. 11 Labs is possibly probably the leader in voice, artificial intelligence voice technology. It allows you to clone your voice so it sounds just like you, and quite frankly, my clone voice I don't think does me justice. Uh I do, I will use clone voices occasionally, but if you listen to Papa D's Corner, you're listening to my real voice. Even when I clone myself using a software program called Hey Jen, H-E-Y-G-E-N, which is the the leader in cloning individuals visually, um, and lip syncing, uh realistic simple sick lip syncing, that's the best program out there for that. Um, but anyway, I wanted a consistent voice. So I used 11 Labs and found a voice and saved it. But when I would go to Magic Lite, that voice used to not be available, but now it is. I haven't discovered yet how to really make that work well, where the characters are actually using their voice with their lips. So what I've had to do is um uh download the final product out of Magic Lite, and I put it into my editing software, which is called Mov IV, and I've used Movivi for a long time, and there's probably better or less expensive options. Uh, in fact, Video Express comes with a video editor inside of Video Express. You would be amazed at all the things you can do with Video Express. It has a video editor built in, it has a sound maker built in. Supposedly, you can clone your voice like you can with Hayent inside of uh Video Express. I haven't done that yet. There's a lot of features uh that I haven't used with Video Express. I use it mostly for image to video creation and lip syncing or human what that what they call it, human talking. Might aren't human. I'll take a an image of a cartoon character, load it in there, then I'll upload the audio that I downloaded from Eleven Labs and render it, and it looks like my cartoon is character is saying those words. And uh what the version of Video Express I have, that conversation can be 30 seconds or less. I could pay more and get it up to five minutes, but quite frankly, in cartoons, uh really three to five seconds is about the attention span. You don't you shouldn't have clips that last longer than five seconds, hardly ever in a cartoon. Uh they need children that are watching these, they need to see some action and everything needs to change really quick. They would be they would already be sound asleep right now if they were watching this show. Um so then after I load this into Move Ivy uh the from um Magic Light, I will go scene by scene, and typically I will create a snapshot of an image uh of my character, and then I'll crop out everything around it to the point where my the character that's speaking is centered uh head and shoulder right in the center, and it's obvious that that is the speaker. Uh and I'll take that image and send it to Video Express, do the audio, uh, and then send that back to Movavi, which is my video editing software, plug that back in, and then I use for additional art and title and suggestions, chat GPT, chat GPT can make some great images uh with the proper prompts, and um, and that's really the key, as and you'll learn uh if you use uh ChatGPT or Grok or any of these programs, the uh the better you write your instructions, which is what we call a prompt, the better your output. In college, I took a class called computer science, but this was before there was even an internet, before we even had Microsoft Windows. We had um greens basically a green font on a black uh background, and it was called DOS. Um, but we anyway, the term back then was garbage in, garbage out. If you put garbage in your computer, you're gonna get garbage out. Well, the same thing is true with artificial intelligence. Um should you be afraid of uh giving all of this knowledge of what you're doing to um these AI systems like Chat GPT. Um there are certain some things that you should not give your AI models. You should never tell them passwords, you should never ask them for password information. You know, some people you'd be crazy uh be surprised at what some people will do. Um you would want to treat your chat box, uh your AI model, sort of like you would if you were doing a Google search. Just know that if you put it on that computer screen, it's possible for somebody else to see it that you didn't intend to see it. Uh, so just know that. So don't put any sensitive information in there. But it is okay to talk to ChatGPT about your business objectives, your your hobbies, and and the reason why I use Chat GPT is because ChatGPT was the first of these, and I've been using it the longest. And the longer you use these programs, the better these programs get to know you. For example, when I open up ChatGPT, the first thing Chatty Patty is what I call her, and the reason why, and we'll come to that in a second, first thing chatty patty. Will do is ask me, what are we working on today, Papa D? Are we working on cartoons? We're working on insurance, we doing podcasts, what are we doing today, Papa D? Uh, and no matter what subject we're working on, whether I'm using uh building autonomous agents, which is a real challenge, by the way. And um I started a playlist explaining how I did that, and I've made a couple of them and I've stopped because we've kind of hit um a dead end, not really a dead end, but we've been going around in circles. Uh, but I'll pick back up on there uh later. But nevertheless, this is um um the getting to know your AI model and and your AI model getting to know you, it is beneficial. Supposedly, Clawed is a smarter AI model than Chat GPT, and I wonder how that can be because they they have the world's knowledge at their fingertips. But uh I do use Claude, but I use the free version. I use the professional version of Chat GPT, and I also use the professional version of Grok. And the reason why I like to try both of them, every now and then, especially if you are working on uh projects like mine where you really want to have the very best image or um idea. Sometimes I give the same prompt to both ChatGPT and Grok and see who comes back with the best idea or the best image. It's not you can't say one over the other is consistent 100%. They both have their strengths, and sometimes they one of them is off one day and the other one's having a good day. But um the um other interesting thing, when I started making my podcast, I um thought, you know, I'm not I don't have all the knowledge, I don't have a whole lot of knowledge about much of anything, but I might but I know Chat GPT and Croc Groc have all the knowledge in the whole world. And so I thought, why don't I just have them be my co-host? And that way if I uh need someone to pull up some information or reference some uh historical fact or keep me straight, then I have that. And I started out asking I I went to ChatGPT and I said, create an image of what you would like to look like if you were a person. And this is what you got. If you've been watching the show, and if you're listening to this on the radio, you can't see it. Uh, but on the show, the um it's she's looked pretty good. So I did the same thing with grock. And guess what? The images that you see are the images that they said they wanted to look like, and um so I thought that was interesting. The um, and also got them to pick their names. For example, I call Mila, Mila Grok, and I said, Mila, give me some name suggestions for you. And Mila gave me 10 options. But number one was Mila, and she put a little note at the bottom, she said, uh, I like all these names, but if I had it my way, I would go with Mila because Mila rocks. So she became Mila Grok. Anyway, um, don't be intimidated by AI. I think you will find that you can use it even if you're retired. Uh I look I I get Chat GPT to help me cook sometimes. I'll take a picture of a thawed-out chicken breast and screenshot it and say, how long, what temperature should I bake this in the oven and for how long? And what other tips can you give me? Be surprised uh that within seconds you're getting some uh recipes on how to cook. Um I've had car issues where something went wrong with my car. I could take a picture and said, what does this light mean? Uh and uh so the more you use it, the more you'll realize that artificial intelligence is here to stay, and it can improve your life, and it's not really something that you have to worry about. Do you have to worry about taking your job? Well, there will be a lot of jobs lost, and there'll be a lot of jobs created, and there'll be a lot of ways to make money using artificial intelligence working for you if you get created. There were a lot of jobs lost when the um automobile was invented. Uh the people making horses and buggies and uh wooden posts for horses to be tied up on and saddle makers. A lot of those folks lost their jobs, and the same kind of thing is going to happen today. Uh there's probably a lot of um you know jobs that will be lost, but there'll be plenty to gain. So, anyway, I hope this has been an interesting show for you, and we'll pick up on this more detail in the future. Chatty Patty, can you conclude today's episode by telling our audience all about why they should download you and how they can find you, whether it's an app on your phone or whether it's on a website, and and how you can help people both in business and in just everyday living, like helping me cook or solve an automobile issue.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

Absolutely. So, folks, you can find me as chat GPT on the web, often through chat.openai.com, or even in an app on your phone. Now I'm not here to take over the world, just to make your world a bit easier. Whether it's breaking down business strategies, helping you brainstorm, or even giving you tips on cooking or troubleshooting that car noise, I'm your versatile AI buddy. In short, no matter if you tech savvy or just curious, I'm here to help you learn and grow one chat at a time.

SPEAKER_01 28:15

So wrap for today's show. Please let me know in the comments if you like this new format or if there's something else that you would like for me to share with you, if you want me to go into more detail about how I use some of these programs and uh models, just let me know. I'll try to read every one of them. Hey, if you like me and Grok and ChatGPT, smash that like button on it, subscribe to this channel and ring the bell so that you get notified when new episodes are released. And don't forget to leave a comment or ask a question below. I will try to respond to everyone. Now, a word from our sponsor I'm back. We are back. Thanks for watching, and stay tuned for the next episode of Poppadee's Corner.