AI · Perusteet is a free, openly licensed introductory course on artificial intelligence, taught in Finnish. 27 lessons across three modules cover how AI systems work, how to use generative AI tools, and how AI agents operate. No prior technical background required. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Note: the course itself is written in Finnish. This page is an English summary, not a translation. If you read Finnish, start at aiperusteet.fi.
A complete, classroom-ready introduction to artificial intelligence for learners with no technical background. The course teaches both how to use AI tools and how to recognise, explain, test, evaluate and justify claims made about them — critical AI literacy is an explicit goal, not a footnote.
The scope is designed as three competence points (osaamispiste) in the Finnish vocational education system, roughly 40 hours of work. The site does not award credit; that decision belongs to the educational institution.
What machine intelligence is and is not, how models are trained, how generative models produce text, why context changes the answer, the limits of memory, multimodality, hallucinations and error types, ethics and responsibility.
Comparing and choosing tools, data protection and local versus cloud execution, building reusable prompt patterns, using AI as a working partner, and designing, building and shipping your own assistant bot.
What separates an agent from a chatbot, ready-made agents, the harness that lets an agent act, tool use and the Model Context Protocol, and the limits and risks of delegating work to autonomous systems.
All content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. You may use, share, adapt and translate the material — including commercially — as long as you credit the author and license derivatives under the same terms. Educational institutions are welcome to copy it into their own environments.
The course was created by Matti Seise, who designed the whole, directed the agent pipeline that drafted and reviewed each lesson, made the edits and approved every lesson before publication. The production process itself used AI extensively — which is described openly on the Finnish front page.