Beginner
What is AI?
A plain-language introduction to artificial intelligence and what it can (and can't) do.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a field of computer science focused on building systems that perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence: understanding language, recognizing images, making decisions, and learning from data.
Most modern AI is machine learning: instead of hand-writing rules, engineers feed a model large amounts of data and let it discover patterns. The model is then tested on new data it has never seen to check whether it generalizes.
Today's most visible AI systems are generative: they create new text, images, audio, and video. They are powerful but imperfect — they can be confidently wrong, reflect biases in their training data, and fail at tasks requiring genuine reasoning or up-to-date facts.
Key points
- AI = systems that learn patterns from data
- Machine learning is the dominant approach
- Generative AI creates new content
- Models can be wrong — verification matters