What does Artificial Intelligence mean?

Before we look at Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT, it is useful to remind ourselves of the definition of Artificial Intelligence. You will easily find similar definitions, such as this one from the European Commission: 

“a machine-based system that is designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and that may exhibit adaptiveness after deployment, and that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments” (European Commission, 2023).

Such definitions are very broad, and there is a wide variation in the capacities of software which is labelled as ‘AI’. 

For a long time, you will have been using familiar computer programs (which may also be referred to as software, tools, or applications/apps) which classify or process existing data.  To take a simple example, you provide data to your email program in the form of information about who the message is for, and what you want to say. The email program processes that information into a format which is understood by various systems which can save, send, and read the message. Artificial Intelligence tools have been available for some time which provide you with help during this process: a spelling and grammar checker, and some software also has text predictors which guess what the next word you want to type is, or provide some stock responses to different types of email you may receive. For instance, you might have received an invitation, and your email software automatically offers you a few answers like “Great, see you there”, or “Sorry, I can’t come”.

Many of us also often use tools such as DeepL or Google Translate, or Grammarly, and these are based on artificial intelligence systems. Most such tools focus on a narrow range of tasks that a human might do, and can do them much more quickly - you have probably already encountered AI tools in many contexts: suggesting what might interest you most in a web search or from social media feeds (“algorithms”) by placing them at the top of the page, recommending the next film you might watch or book you might want to buy, doing more advanced grammar checking if you are writing in a non-native language, translating documents for you, and so on. These tools are in everyday use.

Not everybody agrees that this is a reasonable analogy with human intelligence, which is defined by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a “mental quality that consists of the abilities to learn from experience, adapt to new situations, understand and handle abstract concepts, and use knowledge to manipulate one’s environment.” (Sternberg, 2022 - I thoroughly recommend the whole article Links to an external site.). This disagreement leads to a lot of discussion about the capacity of AI to learn and take over decisions we would prefer humans to take. This is not yet a possibility, and can make it difficult to have simple discussions about what these tools can do at any moment in time.

The phrase Artificial Intelligence is now in common use, so we need to use it in this resource, but we will try not to make direct parallels with human thought processes. Whilst broad discussion about AI is important in society, this resource focuses on whether there is an educational case to use the tools which are currently available. We will look at some of the ethical, equity and regulatory considerations for this in module 2.