What is AI?

Artificial intelligence is software that performs tasks we associate with human thinking, like recognizing patterns, making predictions, or generating text and images.

• Machine learning: models learn patterns from data instead of hand-coded rules.
• Large language models: predict the next likely word based on huge text datasets.
• Generative AI: creates new text, images, audio, or video based on training data.

How AI works (high level)

A simple pipeline you can explain to any age group:

• Data in: many examples (text, images, audio) are collected.
• Model learns: the system adjusts internal weights to spot patterns.
• Testing: we check if it generalizes to new, unseen examples.
• Decisions/output: the model predicts, recommends, or generates.

Key teaching point: models dont “understand” like humans; they find statistical patterns.

Common misconceptions

• AI is not a person; it does not have feelings or intent.
• More data is not always better if the data is biased or low-quality.
• AI outputs are not automatically correct; they need human review.
• “Black box” ≠ magic; transparency and documentation matter.

Everyday AI examples

• Spam filters and email prioritization
• Search suggestions and translation
• Photo tagging and face unlock
• Recommendations in videos, music, and shopping
• Classroom: grammar support, reading level checks, formative feedback