If you've tried to read an explanation of artificial intelligence recently and come away more confused than before, you're not alone. Most explanations fall into one of two unhelpful categories: far too technical, or so vague they explain nothing at all.
This is an attempt at a third option.
Let's Start with What AI Is Not
Artificial intelligence is not — despite what the name implies — a computer that thinks the way humans think. It doesn't have beliefs, intentions, or understanding. It doesn't experience the world. It isn't conscious.
What it does is recognise patterns in data and use those patterns to produce outputs that look, to humans, like intelligent responses.
The Simple Version
Imagine you wanted to teach someone to recognise cats in photographs. You could show them ten thousand photos labelled "cat" and ten thousand photos labelled "not cat." After enough examples, they'd start to notice patterns — the pointed ears, the general shape, the way cats tend to hold themselves — and they'd get quite good at recognising new cat photos they'd never seen before.
AI works on a similar principle. Instead of a person, you have a mathematical system. Instead of photos of cats, you might have billions of pieces of text. The system finds patterns, and when given new inputs, it produces outputs based on those patterns.
Why AI Seems to "Know" Things
Large language models — the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT — have been trained on enormous quantities of text from the internet, books, and other sources. They have, in a very loose sense, absorbed vast amounts of human language and knowledge.
When you ask one a question, it's not looking up an answer in a database. It's producing the sequence of words that its training suggests is most likely to follow your question. Often, this is genuinely useful. Sometimes, it confidently produces things that aren't true at all — which is why understanding how the technology works is so important.
Kai Chen is the author of Your Digital Life, Explained, available now from Soulsprout Press.