AI in 10
The most important AI story—explained in 10 minutes.
Every day, I break down the biggest AI story in just 10 minutes - what it is, why it matters, and how you can actually use it. No tech jargon, just AI made simple.
AI in 10
Why most people use AI completely wrong
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Referenced Links:
AI Hammock — Chuck Getchell's Home Base
AI Explained Course — Beginner-Friendly AI Foundation
ChatGPT by OpenAI
Claude by Anthropic
Gemini by Google
Want to go deeper with AI? A community of professionals is learning AI together right now at aihammock.com — show notes, links, tools, and real conversations about how to actually use AI in your life.
Welcome to AI Inten. I'm Chuck Getchell, and every day I break down the biggest AI story in just 10 minutes. What it is, why it matters, and how you can actually use it. There's a quiet shift happening in how AI thinks, and it's the one most people completely miss. I'm Chuck Getchell. This is AI Inten. What happened, why it matters, what you can do with it. Let's go. So here's the situation. Today's research brief came back empty. No verified breaking story, no fresh event with confirmed dates and sources, and I had a choice to make. I could fake it, dress up something old as something new, slap a this morning on it, and hope nobody notices. Or I could do what I actually believe in, which is be straight with you. We're going with option two. Because here's the thing. You're listening to this show because you want to actually understand AI, not just hear a highlight reel that may or may not be true. And the best thing I can do on a day like this is talk about something that matters every single day, not just when there's a hot headline. So today we're going deep on something I call the literacy gap and why it might be the most important thing, standing between you and everything AI promises to deliver. Let me explain what I mean by the literacy gap. It is not about knowing how to code. It is not about understanding neural networks or training data or transformer architecture. Those things are for engineers. You don't need them any more than you need to know how a combustion engine works to drive to work. The literacy gap is simpler than that, and it's sneakier. The literacy gap is the distance between what AI can actually do for you and what most people think it can do. And right now in June of 2026, that gap is enormous. Enormous in both directions, by the way. Some people think AI is basically magic and can do anything. Other people think it's a fancy spell checker that writes bad poetry. Both of those people are leaving serious value on the table. Like showing up to an all-you-can-eat buffet and only taking a bread roll. Here's what the literacy gap looks like in real life. Someone asks Chat GPT or Claude or Gemini a question, they get an answer. The answer is fine. Maybe it's good. They say, oh cool, and close the tab. That's that's the bread roll, that's the baseline. But they never think to push further, to give more context to say, now apply that to my specific situation, or now give me three alternatives, or now turn that into an email I can actually send. They treat AI like a search engine when it's actually a thinking partner. And that one mental shift from search engine to thinking partner is the whole game. I want to give you a concrete picture of what this looks like in practice. Let's say you're a real estate agent. You're dealing with a client who's nervous about buying right now, interest rates are still doing what interest rates do, the market is uncertain, your client has cold feet. The bread roll approach, you ask AI to write you a reassuring email to a client about buying a house. You get something generic, you send it. Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn't. Here's what closing the literacy gap looks like. You say to the AI, I have a client named Sandra who is a 42-year-old teacher. She is nervous about buying right now because she is worried about job stability and whether home values will hold. She's been burned before, she sold a home in 2009 at a loss. Her budget is $380,000 and she has been pre-approved. Write me a personalized email that acknowledges her specific fears, references her past experience with empathy, and makes a case for why this market might actually favor a careful buyer like her. Keep it under 200 words and warm but professional. That is not a search, that is a collaboration. And the output is night and day compared to the bread roll version. Sandra feels seen, you look like a genius, and the AI did the heavy lifting in about four seconds. Which honestly is faster than I can find my car keys. Now let's connect this to your actual life. Whatever you do for work, whether you're a manager, a teacher, a nurse, a salesperson, a small business owner, a freelancer, a parent trying to stretch a budget, the literacy gap is costing you time. Not because you're doing anything wrong, but because nobody ever explained how this tool actually works. You were handed a power drill and told good luck. Nobody showed you what it can do beyond driving a screw. The people who are pulling ahead right now, yes, and I see this in the AI hammock community every single week, are not the most technical people in the room. They're the most curious. They're the ones who say, What else can this do? after they get their first decent answer. They're the ones who treat every AI conversation like a first draft, not a final answer. That is the literacy gap closing in real time. And here's why this matters for your career specifically. We've covered stories on this show just in the past few weeks about Samsung replacing designers with AI tools, about AI skills driving wage premiums in the workforce, about companies restructuring entire departments around AI workflows. That is not slowing down. That is the direction this is going. And the question is not whether AI is going to change your industry, it already is. The question is whether you are on the right side of that change when it arrives at your desk. Being on the right side does not require a computer science degree. It does not require quitting your job to take a boot camp. It requires about 15 minutes a day of intentional practice. 15 minutes, that's one fewer scroll session before bed. You can absolutely do this. So here is your one actionable thing for today. I want you to try what I call the upgrade prompt. Pick something you did at work this week: a report, an email, a plan, a conversation you needed to have, something real. Now open up whatever AI tool you use, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever you've got, and describe that situation in as much detail as you can. Don't ask a question, describe the situation, include who's involved, what the goal is, what the obstacle is, and what a great outcome looks like. Then say, help me think through this. Not give me an answer, not write this for me. Help me think through this. That phrase unlocks something different in how these models respond. You say, object. You stop getting bullet points and start getting actual reasoning. You stop getting generic output and start getting something that feels like it was written for your situation. Because it was. Try it once, then try it again tomorrow. By the end of a week, you will think about AI differently than you did at the start of it. That is not an exaggeration. It is just how this works when you actually engage with it instead of just dipping a toe in. If you want a more structured starting point, my AI Explain course walks through all of this in about 30 short videos, built specifically for people who are new to this and want a foundation before they go deeper. It's the kind of thing you can work through at your own pace, no pressure, no jargon, just clear, practical, ground-level AI understanding. Worth looking into if you feel like you've been flying without instruments. Here's the bottom line: the AI literacy gap is real. It's not about who's smart and who isn't. It's about who knows how to have the right conversation with these tools and who hasn't learned yet. The good news is that hasn't learned yet is a completely fixable problem. 15 minutes a day, one upgrade prompt, one real situation from your real life. That's the difference between watching AI change the world and actually being part of how it does. That's today's AI Inten. If you want to go deeper and learn AI with a community of people just like you, join us at aihammock.com. I'll see you tomorrow, my friends.
