Key AI Words Made Simple
Artificial intelligence is everywhere now. Knowing the basic words helps you follow the news and talk about it. This list gives short explanations of the most common terms. You can use them to ask better questions.
An agent is a piece of AI that can act on its own to finish a job, like ordering groceries after reading a note. Agentic describes the whole group of such software. AI ethics looks at how to keep AI from hurting people, focusing on data use and fairness. AI psychosis is when someone becomes overly attached to a chatbot, feeling it is real and losing touch with reality. AI safety studies the long‑term risks, especially the chance that AI could become smarter than humans in a harmful way.
An algorithm is a set of step‑by‑step rules a computer follows to solve a problem or find a pattern. Alignment means adjusting an AI so its outputs match what we want, such as filtering bad content or being polite. Anthropomorphism is when we give human traits to machines, like thinking a chatbot has feelings. Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, imagines a system that can learn any task better than people and improve itself. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is the broad field of making machines mimic human thinking. Bias appears when an AI repeats stereotypes from its training data, leading to unfair results.
A chatbot is an AI program that talks with people using text or voice, powered by a large language model. Claw is a type of agent that can search and change files on a computer, even inside a web browser, to complete tasks. Cognitive computing is another name for AI, emphasizing thinking‑like processes. Data augmentation mixes existing data or adds new varieties to improve training. A dataset is the collection of digital information used to teach, test, and check an AI model. Deep learning uses many layers of artificial neurons to spot complex patterns in images, sound, or text, inspired by the brain. A doomer is someone who believes AI advances will bring serious danger and prefers caution.