Technology that lets computers do things that used to need a human mind.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the umbrella name for getting computers to do jobs that used to need human thinking. That covers spotting a cat in a photo, understanding speech, translating, playing Go and writing.
The term is usually traced to a 1955 proposal for a summer research project at Dartmouth College. Early AI followed rules people wrote by hand; most AI today is built with machine learning, where the computer works out the rules from lots of examples.
So AI isn't one machine. Inside AI sits machine learning, inside that sits deep learning, and inside that sit today's large language models.
Think of it like this
AI is like the word "sports". Inside sports there are ball games, and inside ball games there's soccer. When someone says "AI", it helps to ask which kind they mean.
For example
When your phone's photo app gathers all your beach pictures by itself, that's AI at work.
Common mix-ups
Mix-upAI is the name of one machine that thinks like a person.
ActuallyThe computer opponent in a game, a spell-checker and a maps app's arrival-time estimate are all called AI too. AI that thinks broadly like a person has its own name, AGI, and people still don't agree on what would count as one.
Mix-upAI is a brand-new word.
ActuallyThe proposal that first used the name was written by four people, including John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky and Claude Shannon, and it led to a summer workshop in 1956. So "AI" is a word older than most of your parents.
Try it in class
For teachers at the start of a lesson — or for students working on their own.
- Question
- How many times have you used AI since you woke up this morning?
- Activity
- In groups, list five things on your phone or in your apps that do a job that used to need a human mind. Draw the umbrella on the board (AI ⊃ machine learning ⊃ deep learning ⊃ large language models) and decide together where each one goes. Anything you're unsure about goes on a "find out more" list.
Records about this
Source-checked moments from AI history.
The document that gave the field its name. It led to the workshop the following year, in 1956