{"id":523,"date":"2023-03-21T03:14:41","date_gmt":"2023-03-21T07:14:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/introductiontoresearch\/chapter\/what-is-artificial-intelligence\/"},"modified":"2025-09-07T12:53:21","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T16:53:21","slug":"what-is-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.bccampus.ca\/introductiontoresearch\/chapter\/what-is-artificial-intelligence\/","title":{"raw":"What is artificial intelligence","rendered":"What is artificial intelligence"},"content":{"raw":"The term artificial intelligence (AI) was coined in 1956 to describe \u201cthe science and engineering of making intelligent machines\u201d<\/a>. That is, machines and programs that can recognise patterns, analyse data, solve problems, complete tasks, and learn.\r\n\r\nOver the last decade, AI technologies have been incorporated into a wide range of consumer and enterprise products and services. The rapid development of generative artificial Intelligence (GenAI) \u2014\u202ftechnology capable of generating text, images, video, audio and code \u2014\u202fis transforming how we interact with technology at home and work.\r\n\r\nIncreasingly, technology companies are beginning to discuss the emergence of artificial general intelligence<\/a> (AGI), where AI tools match or outperform human beings across a broad range of tasks.\r\n
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\u201cI mean, AI is developing at a crazy fast rate. So, I can't really say in what way it's going to change [in the future], but it will definitely be nearly unrecognisable from how it is right now.\u201d (Sam, Economics and Finance student)<\/blockquote>\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Domains of AI<\/h2>\r\nArtificial intelligence has several underlying domains or fields that are helpful to understand. You may have heard some of these terms before.<\/span>\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_122\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"600\"]\"Key<\/a> \"The Key Domains of Artificial Intelligence: Comprehensive Overview<\/a>\" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.<\/a>, except where otherwise noted.[\/caption]\r\n

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Real world applications<\/h2>\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n\r\nYou might be using AI technologies already embedded in consumer-facing products and platforms. Your mobile phone may have a virtual assistant (Siri, Gemini, Google Assistant, Alexa) that relies on natural language processing<\/strong> to convert your words into prompts the machine can understand and respond to. Your photo app may use machine learning<\/strong> to improve image recognition, allowing you to search your photo Library for pictures of dogs. It can be used for actions such as shopping, translating text and searching. Your translation app may use a\u00a0neural network<\/strong> to figure out what word should come next.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Large Language Models and Generative AI<\/h2>\r\nSince OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, generative AI has emerged as one of the most visible and widely used AI technologies. Generative AI use Large Language Model (LLM), models trained on vast amounts of data using deep learning and neural networks. Users can prompt LLMs, typically via a chat interface and increasingly by voice, to generate sophisticated responses, including the generation of text, images, video, audio and code.<\/span>\r\n\r\nThese chatbots are widely capable and can be applied to a range of tasks. They can:<\/span>\r\n