AI tutorials: how to use ChatGPT and other AI tools
AI tutorials show you, step by step, how to get useful work out of tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot. This section covers setting up an assistant, writing clear requests, working with files and images, protecting private data and checking answers before you rely on them, so you can apply AI to real tasks rather than experiments.
Many people try an AI assistant, get an average answer and stop. The gap between that first try and consistent, useful output is mostly technique: choosing the right tool for the task, giving it enough context, iterating on the result and knowing when not to trust it.
These tutorials are task-first. Each one starts with a job, such as summarising a long document, drafting an email, analysing a spreadsheet or creating an image, and walks through the steps, settings and checks that matter. Where features differ between assistants, the tutorial points to the vendor's own documentation, because menus and plan limits change often.
Every tutorial also covers privacy. Before pasting customer data, contracts or source code into any AI tool, check whether the provider can use it for training, how long it keeps conversations and what your organisation's acceptable use policy allows.
What you will learn
- How to start with ChatGPT and other assistants for everyday work tasks
- How to write requests that get specific, usable answers
- How to work with files, data and images inside AI tools
- Which privacy settings to check before sharing work data
- How to verify AI output and avoid common mistakes
Beginner lessons
Key terms
- Prompt
A prompt is the input you give an AI model to tell it what to do: a question, an instruction, context, examples or a file. The model generates its…
- System prompt
A system prompt is a set of instructions given to an AI model before the conversation begins, defining its role, tone, rules and output format for…
- Hallucination
In AI, a hallucination is output that sounds plausible but is false, unsupported by the model's sources or entirely made up, such as an invented…
- Context window
A context window is the maximum amount of text, measured in tokens, that a language model can take into account at one time. It includes the system…
- Multimodal AI
Multimodal AI refers to models that can understand or generate more than one type of data, such as text, images, audio and video, within a single…
- AI acceptable use policy
An AI acceptable use policy is a document that tells employees how they may and may not use AI tools at work: which tools are approved, what data…
- Large language model (LLM)
A large language model (LLM) is an AI model trained on very large amounts of text to predict the next token in a sequence. That simple objective…
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Further reading
- Loop Engineering: Why Top Engineers Stopped Prompting Their AI
Design the system that prompts your AI agents, not the prompts themselves. What works in production today, what doesn't, and when to skip it entirely.
- Claude Fable 5: What It Is, How to Use It, and the Prompts That Exploit It
Anthropic's first public Mythos-class model, explained with sources: pricing, safeguards, benchmarks, access methods, real use cases, and copy-paste prompts.
Frequently asked questions
How do I start using ChatGPT for work?
Create an account, then pick one repetitive task, such as drafting emails or summarising meeting notes. Describe the task, the audience and the format you want, paste the relevant material, and ask for a first draft. Review it, tell the assistant what to change, and save prompts that work. Check your employer's AI policy before sharing any confidential information.
Which AI assistant should a beginner use?
Start with the general assistant that fits the tools you already use: Gemini is built into Google Workspace, Copilot into Microsoft 365, and ChatGPT and Claude work as standalone apps. Any of them handles everyday writing, summarising and questions well enough to learn on. Compare free-tier limits, privacy controls and file support on the vendors' pages before paying.
Can I trust the answers AI tools give me?
Treat them as drafts, not facts. Language models can produce fluent, confident text that is wrong, a problem known as hallucination. Ask for sources and open them, check figures against the original document, and be most careful with legal, medical, financial and current-events questions. Tools that cite the documents they used make checking faster.
Is it safe to upload documents to an AI tool?
It depends on the provider, the plan and your settings. Many consumer plans allow conversations to be used to improve models unless you opt out, while business and enterprise plans often offer stronger data controls. Read the provider's data-use and retention terms, turn off training where you can, and never upload data your organisation's policy forbids.
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