What is artificial intelligence and how does it work?

Artificial intelligence is software trained to recognize patterns in data and make decisions or predictions based on what it learned. It works kind of like how you learned to recognize faces — show it enough examples and it gets better at the task.

Artificial intelligence is a broad term for any computer system that can learn from examples and make decisions without being explicitly programmed for every scenario. AI powers everything from the filter that keeps spam out of your email to the algorithms that recommend videos you might like. The key difference between AI and regular software is that AI can adapt and improve as it sees more data — it learns instead of just following a fixed set of instructions.