See the mechanism

Catch the metaphors — memory, reasoning, hallucination — and replace them with requests the machine can actually act on.

Anchor it to your world

Ground the AI in your own documents so its answers become grounded and checkable — the single most useful move you'll learn.

Read AI like a literate user

See through a model announcement, a price tag, and a privacy policy — and protect the one thing no vendor can: your own thinking.

About the TertulIA Course

Sixteen patient, plain-language lessons on how AI actually works — no code, no jargon, no hype. You'll learn the mechanism underneath the friendly chat window: where answers come from, why confident answers go wrong, what the machine remembers and what it never knew — and the habits that follow: anchoring it to your documents, verifying instead of deferring, protecting your privacy and your own thinking. This is the literacy course. Every other TertulIA track — creating, coding, researching — stands on the lens this one gives you.

Meet the Creator of TertulIA

Dr. Diego Bonilla is a Full Professor of Communication Studies at Sacramento State and teaches graduate courses at UNAM in Mexico City. In 2026, the CSU Chancellor's Office invited him to speak with media as a faculty expert for the release of its systemwide AI survey. His work on digital literacy precedes the current AI moment by two decades. In 2007 he served on the ETS panel that set the passing standards for iSkills, the national assessment of information and technology literacy, and on the California leadership roundtable whose policy framework preceded the state's 2009 executive order on digital literacy. TertulIA grew out of the faculty learning community on AI literacy he directed at Sacramento State, where these lessons were first taught to professors. Every lesson is his own — designed from his teaching and his research, and offered in both English and Spanish. He also maintains ainews.social, a weekly review of AI developments read through communication theory; his broader work in film, electronic literature, and research is collected at hypergraphia.com.

Course Curriculum

6 Chapters · 17 Lessons

  1. 1
    1. (Included in full purchase)

      L01 — Why Your AI Doesn't Think

    2. (Included in full purchase)

      L02 — Where Does The Next Word Come From?

  2. 2
    1. (Included in full purchase)

      L02b — What Did The Model Actually Read?

    2. (Included in full purchase)

      L02c — Is The New One Actually Better?

  3. 3
    1. (Included in full purchase)

      L03 — Where Confident Wrong Answers Come From

    2. (Included in full purchase)

      L04 — What Did The Model Just Forget?

  4. 4
    1. (Included in full purchase)

      L05 — Anchor Your AI To A Document

    2. (Included in full purchase)

      L06 — When AI Thinks Step By Step

    3. (Included in full purchase)

      L07 — The Energy And Waste Of Using AI

  5. 5
    1. (Included in full purchase)

      L08 — The Six Dimensions Of Every Prompt

    2. (Included in full purchase)

      L09 — Tool Choice As Values Choice

    3. (Included in full purchase)

      L10 — What's Free For You, What Costs Money

  6. 6
    1. (Included in full purchase)

      L11 — The Privacy Floor

    2. (Included in full purchase)

      L12 — Cognitive Offloading And Your Own Mind

    3. (Included in full purchase)

      L13 — AI As Something You Check

    4. (Included in full purchase)

      L14 — Model Collapse And What Comes Next

    5. (Included in full purchase)

      Pay Less, Depend Less

Ready to make sense of AI?

This course is part of TertulIA Complete — one membership, every course, in plain language, with a working take-home from every lesson. The library keeps growing; your membership always has the current set.

$10.00 / month

Enroll Now