AI basics AI Dictionary

AI (Artificial Intelligence)

Software that can do tasks we normally connect with human thinking, like understanding language, recognising images or making decisions.

AI is an umbrella word. It covers everything from the spam filter in your email to tools that write text or generate video. Most AI today learns patterns from large amounts of example data instead of following rules a programmer wrote by hand.

Example

When a video tool turns the sentence “a dog running through water” into a moving clip, that is AI at work.

Why it matters to you

Knowing that AI learns from examples explains both its strengths (it can be surprisingly creative) and its weaknesses (it can be confidently wrong).

Related terms

Machine LearningThe way most AI learns: by finding patterns in examples instead of following hand-written rules. Generative AIAI that creates new content: text, images, video, audio or code. Neural NetworkA computing system loosely inspired by the brain, made of many connected layers that learn from data. AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)A hypothetical AI that could learn and do almost any mental task a human can.