What is Artificial Intelligence?

It is difficult to define Artificial Intelligence as there is not an agreed upon definition and different people can mean different things when they use the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’.

Here are two definitions that you may find helpful:

Definition A:

Artificial Intelligence is the field of study within computer science that focuses on designing computer systems that can perform tasks that we would normally consider to need “human intelligence”, such as making decisions and producing natural language.

The technologies that result from this field of study are known as “AI technologies”.

It can be unhelpful to define Artificial Intelligence like this because:

✘ It is a wide definition, so is not very exact

✘ It defines AI in comparison to “human intelligence”, which gives the false idea that AI technologies have any sort of agency, when in reality they’re just clever ways of making computers perform tasks

It can be useful to define Artificial Intelligence like this because:

✓ It highlights that AI is not one thing, rather it is an entire scientific discipline, a whole field of concepts, problems, and methods for solving those problems. Thinking of “an AI” can be misleading as it suggests that AI is a thing that can be picked up and put down

✓ While this definition is evocative and helps us have a top-level understanding of the kind of tasks we use AI for, the comparison to human intelligence can lead to people misunderstanding the real-world AI technologies with conceptual “thinking” AI characters from science fiction

Definition B:

An AI system is a machine-based system that can for a given set of human-defined explicit or implicit objectives, draw conclusions, from the input it receives, how to generate results such as make predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical, real, or virtual environments.

Different AI systems are designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and adaptiveness after deployment.

- Based on the OECD Definition

It can be unhelpful to define Artificial Intelligence like this because:

✘ It relies on the reader understanding some technological terms

✘ It is dense and abstract, and could miss the opportunity to explain AI to someone trying to understand AI in simple terms

It can be useful to define Artificial Intelligence like this because:

✓ It is precise in its descriptions of what is happening within an AI system

✓ It standardises an understanding of AI that is useful when discussing how to regulate and control AI technologies

✓ By not comparing AI to human intelligence, the description avoids attributing human-like qualities to AI, which can be misleading

Breaking It Down

Many different people have different understandings of Artificial Intelligence, and how to best define it. From the definitions above AI is…

  • The field of study investigating how to create computer systems that can perform very complex tasks autonomously

  • Sometimes describes as technologies that perform tasks that would usually require “human intelligence”

  • More than one thing, on technology or one tool – it’s a whole set of different technologies

  • Used to perform complex tasks such as making decisions, understanding language, and making recommendations

  • Often using algorithms that allow computers to learn from and make predictions based on data, known as “machine learning”

  • Reliant on being trained on vast amounts of data to perform tasks

  • A rapidly evolving and ever-changing concept, meaning definitions and understanding shifts over time

  • Often understood to be “Generative AI”, and the use of AI techniques to generate content such as text, images, and audio – but that is only one type of AI technology

  • A lot of AI technologies have existed for a long time and it is not new – but the rise of Generative AI has led to an increased interest in AI technologies