AI for Everyday Life

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a broad name for computer systems designed to do things such as recognise speech, find patterns, make predictions, or produce text. Many of them learn those patterns from large numbers of examples during a process called training, and then apply what they learned to information they have never seen before. You have almost certainly used some of these systems already, probably without thinking of them as AI. They also do very different jobs. The system that quietly moves a suspicious email into your spam folder cannot write you a birthday speech, and the one that suggests your next song has no idea how to translate a menu. AI is less a single thing than a collection of capabilities. Some AI creates new content, such as text, images, or audio. This is called generative AI, and it is the kind this lesson concentrates on: using a chatbot to help with ideas, explanations, and first drafts. It helps to keep three kinds of behaviour apart, because products often blend them and the difference is not always visible from the outside.