Artificial intelligence (AI) is software that learns patterns from large amounts of data and uses those patterns to make predictions or create new content.
The AI you meet every day
- Recommendations on video, shopping and music apps
- Maps that predict traffic and arrival times
- Chat assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude that write, explain and summarise
What AI is not
AI does not understand the world the way people do. It has no personal experience, no opinions of its own and no guaranteed knowledge of what is true today. It produces the most likely useful response based on what it learned.
Why this matters for you
If you think of AI as a very fast, very widely read assistant that can still be wrong, you will use it well: you will give it clear instructions, and you will check what it gives back.
Key idea: AI is a powerful tool, not an authority.