A plain explanation.
THE SHORT ANSWER
Software that performs tasks which previously required human judgement: recognising images, understanding language, making predictions, generating text.
WHAT IT IS NOT
A thinking machine. Nothing currently available understands anything in the way a person does.
A single technology. The term covers many different techniques with little in common beyond the label.
Conscious, self-aware, or possessing intentions.
WHAT THE TERM ACTUALLY COVERS
Systems that learn patterns from data and apply them to new situations.
A spam filter, a recommendation engine, a translation tool and a chatbot are all called AI, and they work differently.
WHY THE DEFINITION KEEPS MOVING
Tasks that seemed to require intelligence become ordinary once solved. Optical character recognition was AI; now it is just scanning.
WHAT MATTERS PRACTICALLY
Not whether something qualifies as intelligent, but whether it does something useful reliably.
WHERE TO START
Understanding what these systems do well, what they do badly, and where they fail quietly. That is more useful than any definition.
