AI 101: Understanding Artificial Intelligence
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to computer systems designed to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. These tasks include recognizing speech, translating languages, writing content, generating images, analyzing data, and detecting patterns.
AI systems learn from large amounts of data rather than following explicitly programmed rules for every situation. This is what makes them flexible and surprisingly capable across a wide range of tasks.
Types of AI
Narrow AI
Narrow AI is designed for one specific task. It's the AI you interact with every day. Examples include voice assistants like Siri, spam filters in your email, recommendation systems on Netflix or YouTube, and translation tools.
Generative AI
Generative AI creates new content — text, images, audio, video, and code — based on patterns it has learned. This is the category that has grown explosively in recent years.
Well-known generative AI tools include:
- ChatGPT — conversational AI and writing assistant by OpenAI
- Microsoft Copilot — AI built into Microsoft 365 apps
- Claude — AI assistant built by Anthropic
- Gemini — Google's AI model, integrated into Workspace
General AI
General AI — a system capable of performing any intellectual task a human can — remains theoretical. We have not built it yet. Most AI research and most tools you'll encounter today are narrow AI.
A useful way to think about current AI: it is an extremely powerful pattern-matching system trained on vast amounts of human-generated content. It is not thinking or reasoning the way humans do.
Key Concepts to Know
Machine Learning
A method where systems improve over time by finding patterns in data — without being explicitly programmed for every scenario. Most modern AI relies on machine learning.
Large Language Models (LLMs)
AI models trained on enormous amounts of text. They understand and generate human language at a sophisticated level. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are all LLMs.
Hallucination
When an AI produces information that sounds confident and plausible but is factually wrong or made up. This is a known limitation of all current language models. Always verify important AI outputs.
Prompting
The way you give instructions to an AI system. Learning to write clear, specific prompts is the single most practical skill you can develop as an AI user. See our Prompt Engineering guide to get started.
Understanding what AI is — and what it isn't — helps you use it effectively and avoid being misled by its limitations. AI is a powerful tool, not a source of truth.