Why this site exists

The world has just made understanding how artificial intelligence works necessary for a very large number of people, and the full course that explains it, from the simplest mechanism through to the limits worth knowing, is still missing.

Three international frameworks describe what one would need to know to find one’s way: the artificial intelligence literacy framework published in June 2026 by the OECD and the European Commission, and the two UNESCO competency frameworks, one for students, the other for teachers. They set out the expected base of knowledge; The AI Manual provides the material that fills it.

• Empowering Learners for the Age of AI: An AI Literacy Framework for Primary and Secondary Education (“AILit Framework”) OECD and European Commission, 2026.
• AI Competency Framework for Students UNESCO, 2024.
• AI Competency Framework for Teachers UNESCO, 2024.

What this site is

• A free course, with no account to create.
• Published under the CC BY 4.0 licence: it can be copied, translated and reused in class, in training or anywhere else, provided ODERSA is credited.
• Made of hands-on demonstrations that run entirely on the device that opens them, without sending anything anywhere.

What this site is not

• A comparison site for artificial intelligence services: no commercial offer is ranked here.
• An AI detector: no tool on this site claims to settle whether a text was written by a machine.
• An opinion on any given product: no brand is recommended, none is disparaged.
• A case for or against artificial intelligence: this site explains how something works, it takes no side.

The method

Every technical statement on this site carries a public source, opened at the time of writing. What is debated in research is reported as debated. What is not yet known is stated as not known.

The record of the course’s sources lives in the credits. The demonstration pages and the blog articles cite theirs in their own footers. A wrong date, a dead link, a source that has changed address: all of that can be reported.

Universal by design

The mechanism of a model is the same everywhere: cutting text into tokens, predicting the next word, training on data do not change from one country to another. What changes are the rules each country or region imposes around that shared mechanism.

Those rules enter this site as modules, alongside the core, never inside it. The artificial intelligence training obligation written into European law is one example: it is dealt with separately, never standing in for the core that holds everywhere.

Who stands behind this site

The AI Manual is a service of ODERSA, a non-profit association under the French law of 1901: it sells nothing in return and pays out no dividend. The association and its status are presented on odersa.org.

Why it is checkable

No request leaves the device that opens this site. No font, no image, no script is called from a third-party domain: everything is embedded. This can be checked in the browser’s Network tab, while the page loads.

Once opened, this site also works offline.

What comes next

The course is growing. It is served in 7 languages, and the language selector at the top of the page leads to each one. The content is reviewed every six months: the subject moves fast, and the sources move with it.