At a popular level, “AI” is the marketing label du jour for virtually every innovation in software, hardware, and technology that is up for sale or open to investment. Though the term is in ubiquitous use with vague semantic content, surely a more technical definition is on hand. Consider the literal definition of artificial: something made or produced by humans rather than occurring naturally. Everything about generative artificial intelligence is human in origin. Intelligence can also be difficult to define adequately. One fundamental definition is the ability to differentiate between this and that. Perhaps we can do better.

Fully realizing that no single definition can exhaust the many uses and connotations of the term, what follows are a number of definitions of artificial intelligence that highlight many of its different facets.

A Catchall for What Requires Human Intelligence

AI is a catchall term for a set of technologies that make computers do things that are thought to require intelligence when done by people. Think of recognizing faces, understanding speech, driving cars, writing sentences, answering questions, creating pictures.

Will Douglas Heaven, “What Is Artificial Intelligence?“, MIT Tech Review

Intelligent, Computational, Machines

The science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but Al does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable. — Yes, but what is intelligence? — Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world. Varying kinds and degrees of intelligence occur in people, many animals and some machines.

John McCarthy, “What is Artificial Intelligence? Basic Questions”, Stanford FAQ (2007)

Mechanizing Human Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence on a machine, so as to make the machine efficient to identify and use the right piece of “knowledge” at a given step of solving a problem.

Amit Konar, Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing: Behavioral and Cognitive Modeling of the Human Brain (1999)

Algorithms Designed for Problems

The concepts of Al are not restricted to a single set of algorithms. Rather, they extend to the intelligent use of a large number of tools and techniques and to many more algorithms that are designed per the problem requirements. Advances in algorithm design have given us many algorithms that are now being used for problem solving. These advances allow Al techniques to incorporate many diverse fields of algorithms that can be used in multiple ways and on multiple levels.

Real Life Applications of Soft Computing

Simulated Intelligence

AI isn’t really artificial intelligence, but simulated intelligence. It works by statistically predicting what string of words will follow the previous string of words, based on a huge number of samples (the so-called Large Language Models) and a set of grammatical rules. “But it sounds just like real writers!” Well, it does sound like unoriginal writers. The reason why it can mimic them so convincingly is that they compose in pretty much the same way that it does.

J. Budziszewski, “AI, Education, and the Collapse of Thinking” at Andrew McDiarmid’s The Human Adventure

An Old and Ubiquitous Set of Technologies

It is key to understand that AI technology has existed long before OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2023. It goes back nearly a century to Alan Turing’s computing work in the 1940s, with the terms “artificial intelligence” being coined as early as the Dartmouth Conference in 1955. Many of the core ideas behind today’s AI systems, including the backpropagation methods used to train neural networks, were developed as early as the 1970s and 1980s. These ideas sat dormant for decades, limited by data and compute, until cheap GPUs and the explosion of internet scale data unlocked them in the 2010s. What followed was a wave of breakthroughs across the field.

Cicero Institute, “Chatbots Are Not AI” (May 22, 2026)