Main content
Course: AI for education > Unit 3
Lesson 1: What is AI?What is AI?
What is AI and how does it work? And is generative AI the same thing? (Spoiler alert: it's not!)
We'll break it down for you and have you considering the benefits and drawbacks of this rapidly evolving technology. Created by Common Sense Education.
Want to join the conversation?
- It might even use someone else's work without crediting them. What?(3 votes)
Video transcript
You've probably heard a lot about
AI recently, but what is it, really? AI, or artificial intelligence, is when
we teach computers how to do things that usually require human intelligence,
like identifying an object, understanding human speech, and even talking. But how do you teach a computer
to "learn" and "think"? Well, it's kind of like when
you train a pet to do tricks. Think of AI as a robot dog that
you're training to fetch a toy. At first, your robot dog might
not even know what a "dog toy" is! So that's the first thing you need to teach it. You show it lots of pictures of "dog toys" so that
it learns to recognize them quickly and easily. It might make some mistakes at first, but
with each correct answer, it gets a reward. Over time, the dog's recognition improves, the same way you improve at
any task the more you do it. And once the robot dog gets really
good at recognizing what a dog toy is, you can move on to teaching it
the next step of playing fetch – running after the toy and bringing it back to you. This is basic AI, which learns
by analyzing lots of data – in this case, pictures of dog
toys and how to play fetch. But there's something even more
complex, called generative AI, which is more like a creative robot that can
improvise when it comes to making art or writing. Unlike the robot dog, the creative robot
learns from everything on the internet – videos, text, photos, you name it! When you ask it a question or give a hint, it uses what it has learned from
the internet to create new things – like answers, stories, or even pictures. But here's the catch: that creative
robot can sometimes make mistakes. And it doesn't know the
difference between good and bad. It doesn't know if what it
creates is helpful or hurtful. It can't always tell facts from fiction,
or know where its information comes from. It might even use someone's
work without crediting them. It just sucks up all the random or not-so-random information that's floating
out there on the internet. That's why we, as humans, have to think hard and be critical
about the information we receive from AI. We have to know what it does well and what it doesn't do well. As we use generative AI in our lives, remember
that we have to be smart and responsible with how we use it.