Artificial intelligence is a broad field of computer science focused on building systems that can do things we usually think of as requiring human intelligence — understanding language, recognizing objects in a photo, making predictions, or generating text and images. "AI" is an umbrella term: it covers everything from the spam filter in your inbox to the large language models behind modern chatbots.
Most of the AI people interact with today is narrow AI — software that is very good at one specific task but has no general understanding of the world. A tool that writes email drafts cannot also drive a car. The idea of a single system that matches human ability across every task, sometimes called artificial general intelligence, does not exist yet.
Related terms
Machine Learning (ML) · Generative AI · Large Language Model (LLM)