Using and Understanding AI

AI is changing how people write, study, create, and work. You can ignore it, panic about it, or learn how it actually works and decide for yourself what to do with it. This course is for the third option. You'll spend the semester making things with AI and taking apart how it works, and you don't need any technical background to do either.

Registration requires approval. To apply, have a short conversation with an AI that gets to know you. We read every one and are putting together a class drawn from across the university.

Interested? Apply by Telling Us About Yourself

Applying is a short conversation with an AI about who you are, how you use AI now, and what you'd want to make. It's not a test, and there are no wrong answers. We read every one.

Start your application

What You'll Make

The course ran for the first time in Spring 2026. Here is some of what students built, all through conversation with AI rather than code:

• Images, video, and music in a creative media lab, including full songs generated from a text prompt
• A working website of your own design, built and shared in a single meeting
• Study guides and practice tests, plus a hard look at which AI study strategies actually help you learn
• A data analysis of a dataset you chose, with AI doing the number crunching and you asking the questions
• A final project of your own choosing, built across two in-class workshops, plus a short reflection video

What You'll Understand

Making things is half the course. The other half is figuring out what is going on underneath:

• How language models work. You'll play with next-word predictions and temperature, then compare them to a Markov babbler, a much simpler statistical model that gets surprisingly far.
• How AI learns. Single neurons, small networks that read handwritten digits, embeddings, and the training stages that turn a raw model into a helpful assistant.
• What it costs. The data, energy, human labor, and infrastructure behind every response.
• Where it fails. Early in the semester, an AI scavenger hunt sends you looking for hallucinations, flattery, memory lapses, and overconfidence.
• The big questions. Can AI be creative? (We watch the AlphaGo documentary and argue about it.) Does it understand anything? What does it mean for work, relationships, safety, and human flourishing?

Who It's For

Anyone curious about AI. No programming or technical background is required, and no major is a better fit than another.

Skeptics are welcome. The syllabus says plainly that these tools have real costs and that reasonable people object to them. You will be expected to use AI throughout the semester, but the goal is for you to judge it from experience, not to sell it to you.

Meetings are active, not lectures. Most of class time is spent working with a partner, discussing in small groups, and sharing out with the room.

One practical note: CS 199 UAI is a pure elective. It does not satisfy any degree, program, or general education requirement.

How It Works

Here is how Spring 2026 ran. Details may change for Spring 2027.

• Two 75-minute meetings a week, mixing hands-on labs, guided explorations of how AI works, and discussions of short readings.
• Preparation chats. Before a discussion, you talk through the reading with an AI that checks you're ready to contribute.
• Conversational assessments. Instead of a multiple-choice quiz, an AI interviews you about what you've learned.
• A final project and video that pull the semester together.

Questions?

Ask below. The answers come from an AI that has read this page and the draft syllabus. This chat is not part of your application. For anything it can't answer, email Geoff at challen@illinois.edu.

Stay in Touch

Read the draft syllabus, or browse every meeting from Spring 2026 in the course archive.