What is Artificial Intelligence?
You'll be able to
- Define artificial intelligence in plain language
- Separate AI from automation and human-like thinking
- Recognise where AI already shapes everyday life
Artificial Intelligence is the discipline of building systems that perform tasks that normally require human intelligence — understanding language, recognising images, making decisions, and learning from experience. At its core, AI is software that improves its own performance through data and feedback.
The important shift is from rules to learning. Classic software runs a fixed set of instructions written by a programmer. AI systems instead learn patterns from examples, which lets them handle situations their creators never explicitly coded.
Rules vs. Learning
- Classic software: given input X, apply rule R, return output Y.
- Machine learning: given many examples of (X, Y), infer the rule automatically.
- This is why AI generalises to new, unseen examples.
A useful mental model: if you can describe a task perfectly with rules, you probably do not need AI. AI shines where the pattern is real but too complex to hand-code.
# Not real code — a sketch of the shift in thinking.
# Rule-based: if "free" in message: return "spam"
# Learned: score = weight * features(message)
# model adjusts weights from thousands of labelled examplesChallenge
Spot the AI
List three products you used today and classify each as (a) fixed-rule software, (b) machine-learned AI, or (c) a mix. One sentence of reasoning for each.
Knowledge Check
What is AI?
What best describes the difference between classic software and AI?
A system that lets you learn rules from data is considered 'intelligent' only if it can also feel emotions.
Answer all questions to submit.