DIY AI for Beginners: A Healthier, More Honest Way to Work With AI

Written By Gregory Sklar

DIY AI for Beginners: A Healthier, More Honest Way to Work With AI

If you’re new to AI, the best place to start is DIY AI for beginners—and not because it’s flashy or magical, but because it keeps things comfortable, grounded, and honest.

One of the real dangers of AI shows up when we anthropomorphize it. When we stop calling it a robot and start thinking of it as a person, we blur an important mental boundary. AI isn’t a being. It’s not conscious. It’s not magic.

It’s a machine—basically a pile of robot parts—trained to predict the most likely next answer based on patterns from human language going all the way back to the early internet.

That reminder alone does wonders for mental health.

AI isn’t thinking.
It’s guessing—very well.

Treat AI Like a Robot (Because It Is One)

Once you accept that AI is just a robot, something powerful happens:
you realize you should be able to fine-tune it at every step, just like any other machine.

The easiest way to do this is to avoid treating AI like a human text conversation. Humans rely on memory, emotional continuity, and long back-and-forth threads. Robots don’t need that—and pretending they do creates confusion and loss of control.

A healthier beginner approach is this:

  • Every prompt is a stand-alone question

  • Every answer is self-contained

  • You can stop, reset, or restart at any time

  • Nothing is “locked in” forever

This mirrors how we’ve always used the internet: search → result → decide → move on.

From a mental health standpoint, this is huge. Each interaction reminds you:
“Yes, this is a robot. I asked a question. I got an answer. I’m done—or I start fresh.”

Conversation Is Optional, Not Mandatory

If you choose to build on previous answers (what I call “hopscotch”), that’s fine. You can chain ideas together and keep going.

But control should default to the user, not the system.

Ideally, previous answers should be assumed erased unless the user explicitly wants continuity. The reason most AI works the opposite way isn’t for your benefit—it’s for the company’s. Persistent context and memory mean more data about you.

User-centered, safe AI flips that model:

  • Recall should be opt-in

  • Memory should exist for the user’s benefit, not the platform’s

The Second Big Piece: Comparators & Toggles

The next major step for healthy beginner AI use is choice.

For decades, Google search showed us multiple results. Humans decided what to trust.
When AI arrived, we suddenly accepted one answer and stopped questioning it.

That’s a massive shift—and not a good one.

A safer, more empowering approach is to toggle between multiple AIs and compare outputs side-by-side. Different models think differently. Seeing that reminds you there is no single “truth machine.”

This is why comparator models matter.

With tools like wonprompt.ai, you can:

  • Run the same prompt through multiple LLMs

  • See different responses at the same time

  • Stay in the role of decision-maker, not passive receiver

AI works best when humans stay in control.

Robots answer.
Humans choose.

My first tech idea was an app that helps you speed read, back in 2002. Now I can make that same app in 2 different ways and update each day, at a time.

What are some dream tech ideas you may have had sitting there in the back of your mind for a long time?

Now, with ai you can do them them all!

Gregory Sklar
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