Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is software that carries out tasks which normally need human intelligence: recognising objects in a picture or words in speech, processing language, making predictions, and making decisions. AI is software only, so it is not a robot and it is not conscious, even when it replies in a friendly, human-sounding way.

You probably meet AI several times a day without noticing. The table shows the main everyday kinds.

Use	What the AI does
Searching your own photos	Finds the pictures that match a description you type, such as 'beach' or 'cake', by recognising what is in each image
Recommendation systems and targeted adverts	Find patterns in what you and other people choose, then suggest something you might like or pick adverts to show you
Speech-to-text and translation	Turns speech into written words, so a video gets subtitles or a message is dictated, and can translate words between languages so a notice is read in another language
Voice assistants	Listen to a spoken question and answer aloud, or carry out a simple task such as setting a reminder
Chatbots	Hold a back-and-forth conversation with you, such as answering questions about term dates on a school website
Generative tools	Produce new text, code, images, music, voices or video from a prompt you type

One request can chain several of these together. A pupil on a school trip photographs a poster in another language: the phone's AI lifts the words out of the picture, translates them and can read the result aloud. Each stage is a separate job that would once have needed a person who could read that language and speak it.

These jobs suit AI because they are very hard to write as fixed rules. You cannot list simple instructions that spot any cat in any photo, or make sense of any accent, so AI is used wherever the input is messy real-world material such as pictures, sound and language.

Practise this