AI Literacy / Glossary

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is software that learns patterns from examples and uses them to make predictions, recommendations, decisions or new content, instead of only following rules a person wrote down.

A normal program follows step-by-step instructions written by a programmer. An AI system is trained on lots of examples, such as photos, texts or past decisions, and works out the patterns itself. That is why it can recognise a cat in a photo or suggest the next word in a message.

AI is already in everyday things: spam filters, photo search, navigation apps, product recommendations, voice assistants and chatbots. Most of it is narrow: very good at one kind of task and not able to think or understand like a person.

Because AI learns from data, it can repeat mistakes or gaps in that data and can sound confident while being wrong. Using it well means knowing what it is good at, checking what matters and keeping a human responsible for important decisions.