The course

You are going to make five things: text, from the machine behind every chat window; pictures on commission; a voice that belongs to nobody; a song; and video, bought by the second. Ten lessons, five topics, and each topic comes twice: a concept lesson that ends by handing you a Field Card, the facts you can carry with no code in sight, and a workshop where a notebook runs under your own hands and confirms every one of them. The concept lesson stands complete for someone who will never open a notebook; the workshop is there for the day you do. Nothing in these lessons is staged. The result shown is the result the machine returned; the mediocre takes stay on screen, because variance is the medium and hiding it teaches the opposite; the refusal you will run into is shown as it happened, dated, word for word, because failures here are curriculum, not embarrassment. Every price you hear is itemized on a receipt, and the model that made each artifact is named on screen, so you will know what worked, what it cost, and when the lesson starts to age. And every lesson comes as two videos on one page, the same class twice. The Abbreviated sits on top, every picture of the full lesson at a faster walk. The Explained sits below, the same pictures with room to breathe, two voices trading the material. Nothing lives in one cut that is missing from the other, so choose by the time you have today, and switch freely from lesson to lesson.

Curriculum

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Every tool in this course comes with a free tutorial from the company that sells it.

A vendor's tutorial shows you the good take; the mediocre ones are cut, the bill stays off screen, and what the machine did not do goes unsaid. Here the mediocre take stays, because variance is the medium. The refusal is on camera, dated, verbatim. No narration quotes a total the receipt does not itemize, and when a tool is the wrong price for you, the lesson says so. What is for sale here is the practice itself, whole, failures and prices included.

Diego Bonilla, Ph.D.

I have been making work with machines that decide since 2000, when I began building films that a machine assembles differently for every viewer; the first of them took first prize at the Moscow International Film Festival, two decades before the industry shipped a generative model. A generative video poem I made with a UNAM poet was selected for the field's definitive anthology and exhibited in Sacramento and Istanbul, and in 2025 my VR work took an award at an AI film festival. The tools in this course are the ones I work with: they made the pictures and the voices you will see inside, and every one of those generations is in the ledger. I have also taught for thirty-seven years: Full Professor of Communication Studies at Sacramento State, graduate courses at UNAM, a doctorate from Syracuse. That is the pairing this course needs, someone who makes with these tools and has spent a career explaining machines to the people who have to live with them. I will show you the take that worked and the take that did not, because the difference between the two is the course. Ph.D., Syracuse University · Full Professor of Communication Studies, Sacramento State · Graduate courses, UNAM · First prize, Moscow International Film Festival, for a machine-assembled film · Generative video poem selected for the field's definitive anthology, exhibited in Sacramento and Istanbul · Award for VR work at an AI film festival, 2025 · Thirty-seven years teaching

The ledger

The things this course makes have no ground truth, but the chain that made them does. Every generation, on camera or in preparation, is logged: the prompt, the model and its version, the moment, the cost, the file that came back. What reaches the screen is bound to that log; an on-camera result is never swapped for a better one, and a mediocre take is never discarded, because mediocre is not a reason. Every cost carries one of two labels: BILLED, read from the account's own bill, or MODELLED, priced from a published sheet whose date is on screen. No narration quotes a total the receipt does not itemize, and the model is named on screen at its first generation, so each lesson ages honestly instead of pretending to be current.

The first lesson opens the machine behind the chat.

Ten lessons, two cuts each; choose by the time you have today, and keep everything you make.

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