Artificial intelligence

In short

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the field of building computer systems that do tasks which normally need human thinking, such as understanding language, recognising images or making predictions. Most AI today learns patterns from data rather than following hand-written rules.

Also called: AI
Topic: The basics
Level: Beginner
First described: The term appears in the title of the August 1955 proposal by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon for a Dartmouth College study in summer 1956⁴.

There is no single agreed definition. The UK government's 2023 AI white paper said no definition "enjoys widespread consensus"¹. Instead it described AI by two traits: adaptivity, meaning systems are trained on data and can infer patterns their programmers never spelled out, and autonomy, meaning some systems make decisions without a human in control¹.

The EU AI Act's legal definition centres on inference. An AI system is a machine-based system that "infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions"². The UK data regulator, the ICO, calls AI "an umbrella term" for technologies that carry out functions that previously required human thinking³.

Early AI relied on "expert systems" built from large numbers of hand-written rules. The ICO notes these were expensive to scale and coped poorly when the rules were not flexible enough³. Data-driven machine learning has since become the dominant approach³.

The name dates from a 1955 proposal for a summer study at Dartmouth College, which set out to find how to make machines "use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves"⁴.

AI is now an everyday tool rather than a lab project. Ofcom figures quoted by the Government Digital Service suggest 54% of UK adults say they use AI tools, up from 31% the year before⁵.

Example

When you type a question into the GOV.UK app in everyday language and get a conversational answer drawn from official guidance, you are using AI. The GOV.UK Chat feature launched in the app in May 2026⁵.

Why it matters

AI now shapes search results, public services and decisions about people, and whether a tool legally counts as AI decides which rules apply to it².

Questions people ask

Is AI the same as machine learning?

No. Machine learning is one way of building AI, in which a system learns patterns from data. The ICO says data-driven machine learning is now the dominant AI technology, but older AI used hand-written rules instead³.

How does the UK government define AI?

In its 2023 white paper the government said no definition enjoys widespread consensus. It chose to describe AI by two traits, adaptivity and autonomy, rather than fix one wording¹. The EU AI Act, by contrast, sets a legal definition in Article 3².

Who invented artificial intelligence?

No single person. The name comes from a 1955 proposal by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon for a 1956 summer study at Dartmouth College⁴.

Related terms

Tools that use it

Sources

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