Lesson 1 of 10
What artificial intelligence is—and is not
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad term for computer systems that perform tasks associated with human abilities, such as recognizing patterns, understanding language, or choosing an action. Machine learning (ML) is one approach to AI: instead of writing every rule by hand, developers train a model to find patterns in examples.
- Rules: a person specifies the exact decision steps.
- Machine learning: a model estimates a pattern from examples and applies it to new cases.
- Generative AI: a model produces new text, images, audio, or other content from a prompt.
Models do not automatically know what is true or understand the world as people do. Their output depends on training data, the task, and how results are checked.
Try it: Pick a task such as sorting incoming support messages. Write one possible hand-coded rule, then describe what examples a learning system would need.