What is AI?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to computer systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. This includes things like recognising speech, translation, making decisions, and creating new content, such as text or images.
AI has been around us for decades, feeding us advertisements, suggesting movies, shaping what we see on social media, and powering navigation apps and voice assistants.
But more recently, AI has been put in the hands of everyone, at scale. Rather than just analysing and categorising data, we now have Generative AI. For teachers, it can write lesson plans, create personalised worksheets, and even provide feedback — all in seconds.
This breakthrough happened because of relatively recent advances. Let's dive in.
AI is an umbrella term that includes several subfields:
- Machine Learning (ML) – systems that learn from data.
- Deep Learning (DL) – a subset of ML using artificial neural networks.
- Generative AI – DL models that create new content (e.g., text, images, code) based on patterns in data.
Imagine AI is a whole school system. ML is the curriculum. DL is a specialised program, and Generative AI is a student who creates new work based on everything they've learned.