The best free AI courses and certificates for upskilling in 2026 – and I’ve tried them all

I have been working with AI for a very long time. Back then, I carried out one of the first academic studies on AI ethics as my final thesis. I created and launched an expert system development environment before the first connection to the World Wide Web was established.

I did some of the first AI research on RISC-based computer architectures (the chips in your phone) when RISC processors were the size of refrigerators.

I also wrote and deployed AI Editor, a generative AI tool that dynamically creates news and content. This may not seem like much today, but I did it back in 2010 when I had to develop a generative AI engine from scratch. To function at this point, it had to be distributed across five individual servers, each running one agent from a team of clustered AI agents.

I’ve just finished coding a free AI defense product available to all WordPress users that allows them to defend against AI training and scraping, as well as an advanced version (that people pay for) that…