Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad name for computer systems that do tasks we usually think need human intelligence: understanding language, recognising images, making predictions, or writing text.
It is a big umbrella. Inside it are a few terms you will hear constantly. They fit inside each other like boxes:
┌─ Artificial intelligence (AI) ─────────────────────────────┐
│ Any technique that makes computers act "smart" │
│ ┌─ Machine learning (ML) ───────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ Systems that learn patterns from examples │ │
│ │ ┌─ Deep learning ──────────────────────────────────┐ │ │
│ │ │ ML using large "neural networks" │ │ │
│ │ │ ┌─ Generative AI ─────────────────────────────┐ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ Creates new text, images, audio, code │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ e.g. large language models (LLMs) │ │ │ │
│ │ │ └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │ │ │
│ │ └───────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │ │
│ └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Rules versus learning
Older software follows rules a programmer wrote by hand: "if the email contains 'free money', mark it as spam." That works until spammers change their wording.
Machine learning flips this around. Instead of writing the rules, you show the computer thousands of examples — "this email is spam, this one isn't" — and it learns the patterns itself. It can then judge emails it has never seen.
What generative AI adds
Most traditional machine learning chooses or predicts: spam or not spam, which photo shows a cat, what tomorrow's sales might be.
Generative AI creates something new: a paragraph, a picture, a piece of code, a voice. Chat assistants like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude are generative AI. So are image generators.
AI you already use
- Your phone's keyboard suggesting the next word
- Photo apps finding "beach" pictures
- Spam filters in your email
- Maps estimating arrival times
- Chat assistants answering questions
Some of these are classic machine learning; the chat assistants are generative AI. All of them are "AI".
Quick check: a spam filter that learned from thousands of example emails — is that machine learning or hand-written rules? (Machine learning — it learned the patterns from examples.)