What is AI?

Let's start with what AI is not.

It's not a robot. It's not a mind. It's not conscious, it doesn't have feelings, and it's not going to take over the world tomorrow. The movies lied to you.

So what is it?

Artificial Intelligence is software that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence.

That's it. That's the definition.

"Tasks that require human intelligence" includes things like:

• Recognizing faces in photos
• Understanding spoken language
• Translating between languages
• Playing chess (or Go, or video games)
• Writing text that sounds human
• Making decisions based on complex data

When a computer does any of these things reasonably well, we call it AI.

The magic trick

Here's the thing that makes AI feel magical: we don't explicitly program the rules.

In traditional software, a programmer writes exact instructions:

• "If the email contains 'viagra', mark it as spam"
• "If temperature > 100°F, turn on the fan"
• "If user is under 18, block the content"

Every rule is written by a human. The computer just follows orders.

With AI, we take a different approach. Instead of writing rules, we show the computer thousands (or millions) of examples:

• "Here are 10,000 spam emails and 10,000 regular emails. Figure out the pattern."
• "Here are a million photos with cats labeled and a million without. Learn to spot cats."
• "Here are 500 billion words from the internet. Learn how language works."

The computer finds patterns we didn't explicitly teach it. Sometimes patterns we didn't even know existed.

That's the magic. That's why it feels different.

The different flavors

Not all AI works the same way. Here's a quick map:

Machine Learning (ML): The broad category of AI that learns from data. Most modern AI is ML.

Deep Learning: A specific type of ML using "neural networks" (inspired loosely by brain structure). This is what powers most impressive AI today.

Large Language Models (LLMs): AI trained on massive amounts of text to understand and generate language. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are LLMs.

Generative AI: AI that creates new content like text, images, music, and code. The "generative" part means it makes things, not just classifies them.

These terms overlap. ChatGPT is an LLM, which is generative AI, which uses deep learning, which is a type of machine learning, which is a type of AI.

What AI is good at

• Pattern recognition: Finding needles in haystacks
• Processing scale: Analyzing millions of data points instantly
• Consistency: Never getting tired, never having a bad day
• Specific tasks: Narrow, well-defined problems

What AI is bad at

• Common sense: Understanding that a person can't be in two places at once
• Novel situations: Dealing with things it's never seen before
• Explaining itself: Often can't tell you why it made a decision
• Knowing what it doesn't know: Will confidently give wrong answers

The honest truth

AI is a tool. An incredibly powerful tool, and a tool nonetheless.

It's not intelligent the way you're intelligent. It doesn't understand the world. It finds statistical patterns in data and uses those patterns to make predictions.

Sometimes those predictions are so good they feel like magic. Sometimes they're confidently, spectacularly wrong.

The key is knowing when to trust it and when to verify.

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That's AI in a nutshell. Want to go deeper? Next up: What is Machine Learning?, where we dig into how these systems actually learn.