Artificial Intelligence
Also known as: AI
Artificial intelligence is a computer that learned by looking at a great many examples, instead of being told the rules.
Nobody sat you down and read you a list of rules for what a dog is. You did not learn four legs, fur, tail, barks from a book.
You saw a lot of dogs. Big ones, small ones, fluffy ones, one that looked a bit like a mop. After enough dogs, you just knew.
That is what the computer does. We show it thousands and thousands of pictures, and after a while it can tell us: that is a dog.
It never gets a rule. It only gets examples. So the examples we choose really matter.
Color this: here are six pictures. Four are dogs. One is a cat wearing a dog costume. One is a mop. Circle the ones you would show the computer. Cross out the ones that would confuse it.
For the grown-up holding the crayon box:
Learning from examples rather than rules is the honest core of machine learning, and a child can hold it. The costume and the mop are not a joke, they are the introduction to bad training data, which is the part of AI literacy adults most often lack.