
5 free mindset-shifting AI courses for creative entrepreneurs
Where do you start on your journey into AI? As creatives, AI both threatens us and offers us boundless opportunities. While many creatives still regard artificial intelligence with contempt and distrust, some are leaping ahead and exploring this new technology to the maximum extent possible.
An example is Domenic Ashburn, aka ‘Mr Grateful,’ a graphic designer in Dayton Ohio, who grew his Instagram following from 5,000 to over 180,000 in one month after he ‘hired’ AI as his social media manager. He has now abandoned all his design clients and is focused on working with AI to raise $1m in 100 days. You can follow his journey on Instagram.

For those who are not, like Domenic, already stripping themselves of their primitive pre-AI ways of life, I put together a list of hard-hitting, insightful AI courses that will help creative entrepreneurs make better decisions about AI and deploy AI tools with confidence.
I’d love to hear what you think about them. Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
1. What is generative AI?
Chat GPT writes blog posts. Midjourney creates images. AdCreative generates ads. These are all examples of generative AI.
This is a type of artificial intelligence that focuses on creating new content or predictions based on learned patterns from input data.
It’s used in text generation, image creation, music composition, and predictive modeling, among other applications. For instance, AI models like GPT-4 can generate human-like text, while Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can create realistic images. AI can also be trained to create new music or predict future data trends.
This course takes you through the foundations of generative AI, how it works, how to create your own content, and goes over some popular generative AI apps.
Instructor: Pinar Seyhan Demirdag, AI Director at AI Production Company, Seyhan Lee
View the Course: On LinkedIn Learning
2. Foundations of Responsible AI
As a creative entrepreneur, it’s important to understand the issues around algorithmic bias and unfairness, especially as we all start to use AI more and more in our daily lives and our businesses.
In this course, data scientist and AI ethicist Ayodele Odubela teaches the principles of responsible AI (RAI), as well as the frameworks necessary to apply RAI techniques in AI systems. Ayodele discusses big data and where it comes from, then covers several important points of data awareness and literacy. She goes over ethical frameworks, consequence scanning, fairness, accountability, and more. She also explains fairness-related harms, why they arise, why they matter, and what you can to avoid or mitigate them. Plus, Ayodele offers a detailed description of human rights as related to AI.
Instructor: Ayodele Odubela, Data Scientist and AI Ethicist
View the Course: On LinkedIn Learning
(This is a paid course, but you can access it for free with LinkedIn’s one-month-free offer)

3. 32 ChatGPT Tips for Beginners
This is not a course per see. Truth is a lot of the courses I looked at are full of useless deep AI introductions and deviations. Let me clarify; useless if you’re an entrepreneur looking to dive into the meat of the matter. You want practical advice, leads, sales, clients. I got you.
This YouTube video is a crash course in using ChatGPT for better results. You can use the lessons you learn here, to generate better outlines for your blog posts, better copy for your newsletters, better to-do lists for your team, etc.
Note: I highly recommend only using ChatGPT outputs as a starting point. The Internet is already awash with AI-generated blog posts that sound like they were written by a ball bearing with a faulty computer chip stuck to it. Don’t do that.
Instructor: Drake Surach, ChatGPT Expert
View the Course: On Youtube
4. AI For Everyone
If you’re going to learn something about AI, a great person to learn it from is Andrew Ng. This dude has authored or co-authored over 200 research papers in machine learning, robotics, and related fields. He is a globally recognized leader in AI and a pioneer in machine learning and online education. In 2013, he was named to the Time 100 list of the most influential persons in the world.
This course starts with a two-hour introduction to AI, which we will sit through because it’s by Andrew. This is followed by modules on building AI projects, using AI in your business, and finally one on AI and society.
Instructor: Andrew Ng, Founder of DeepLearning.AI, General Partner at AI Fund, Chairman & Co-Founder of Coursera, and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University
View the Course: On Coursera

5. Mastering the Latest AI Tools for Digital Marketers
I didn’t want to do this to you. Slam you with a five-hour-long Youtube video. I like things broken up so you can consume them in bite-sized chunks. But not this monster. They had to upload the whole thing in the size of a granite block.
But it’s worth it. This recording is from an AI Marketing Conference hosted by Skillbooster Digital Marketing Academy in March 2023.
It covers the latest AI tools and techniques for digital marketing, strategies and tactics for email marketing, content strategy, pay-per-click optimization, and other insights for AI-driven digital marketing domination. There’s a session on Prompt Engineering for Marketing, one on the Top 23 Tools for Digital Marketers, and another on How to use A.I. to Predict Customer Actions, among many others.
Instructors: Several instructors, led by Anton Voroniuk, CEO of SkillsBooster Academy
View the Course: On Youtube or right here on this website, below this text 😉…