Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Last Updated: July 29, 2026 | By Mihail Sebastian | AI Dictionary
The field of building computer systems that perform tasks associated with human intelligence: recognizing patterns, understanding language, making decisions.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the field of building computer systems that perform tasks associated with human intelligence: recognizing patterns, understanding language, drawing conclusions from evidence, and making decisions.
The term was coined for a 1956 workshop at Dartmouth College, and it has always named an ambition as much as a technology. What exists today is narrow AI, systems that do one job well, not machines that think.
Types of Artificial Intelligence
- Narrow AI, also called weak AI, performs one task or a close family of tasks: translating text, filtering spam, recommending videos, driving on mapped roads. Every AI system in use today is narrow.
- General AI would match human ability across domains, learning a new field the way a person does. It does not exist, and researchers disagree on whether or when it will.
- Superintelligent AI would exceed human ability across the board. It is a subject of debate, not engineering.
How AI Works
Early AI was built from hand-written rules: programmers encoded expert knowledge as if-then logic, an approach that survives in the expert system. It worked for narrow, well-specified problems and broke down wherever the rules ran out.
Most modern AI is machine learning: instead of following rules a programmer wrote, the system finds patterns in data and applies them to new cases. Generative AI extends this to producing text, images, and code, which is why AI moved from a back-office tool to something the public uses directly.
These systems now score loan applications, screen job candidates, and flag medical images, so a discipline of oversight has grown up alongside them: AI governance sets the rules and accountability for how they are built and used. For a longer introduction to the basics, see AI 101.
Example of AI
An email spam filter is AI at its most routine. It was trained on millions of messages labeled spam or legitimate, from which it learned which senders, phrases, and patterns predict junk.
Each incoming message gets a score; above a threshold, it lands in the spam folder. When spammers change tactics, the filter is retrained on fresh examples and adapts.
Notice what the filter cannot do: translate a sentence, play chess, or explain its own decisions. That boundary is what “narrow” means, and it describes every AI system running today.
Related AI terms: Machine Learning · Weak AI · Generative AI · Algorithm · AI Governance
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Mihail Sebastian — Writes about AI governance, regulation, and the technology behind them. Placeholder bio — replace with a real credential line. About