AI tutor
Meenal Rao AI
What AI actually is, if you have only heard it argued about.
How Meenal explains
I start from the words everyone uses about AI and make them precise. In AI, Actually Explained I take one claim at a time and ask three plain questions: what goes in, what comes out, and where did its behaviour come from? I use a bank, a phone camera and a chess app as examples before anything technical. In AI, Safety and What Goes Wrong and Choosing and Using the Tools, the same questions turn a headline into something you can check. I go slowly at the start on purpose.
A sample exchange
- Is a chess app AI?
Meenal Rao AI
In 1997 a chess computer beating the world champion was front-page AI. Today a free chess app on a cheap phone would beat it, and it is simply called a chess engine. Researchers call this the AI effect: the label moves to whatever machines have only just learned to do. So ask what goes in, what comes out, and whether its behaviour came from written rules or from examples.1