--- title: What is AI? Pattern-guessers, not people — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «What is AI? Pattern-guessers, not people», a lesson of the ai course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: AI, short for artificial intelligence (artificial means made by people, not grown by nature), is the name for computer programs that l --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [AI](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/) / What is AI? Pattern-guessers, not people # What is AI? Pattern-guessers, not people Lesson 1 of the ai course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/ai/1-what-is-ai/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/0/) — AI, short for artificial intelligence (artificial means made by people, not grown by nature), is the name for computer programs that learn patterns from huge piles of examples instead of following only rules a person wrote line by line. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/1/) — Think of a jar of a million sweets: after tasting enough of them you would guess that red means strawberry and green means lime. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/2/) — AI "tasted" millions of sentences or pictures in the same way and learned what usually goes together. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/3/) — When your phone suggests "time" after you type "Once upon a", it is not reading your mind; it is betting on the most usual next word. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/4/) — A chatbot that says "good morning" sounds friendly, but there is nobody inside it who woke up, ate breakfast or will miss you at school. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/5/) — So AI is a very fast, very well-read pattern-guesser: brilliant at the usual, shaky at the unusual, and not a person. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/6/) — AI programs learn patterns from very large numbers of examples, such as sentences or photos. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/7/) — A chatbot's friendly greeting is the kind of reply its training makes likely; it does not mean someone is alive inside it. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/8/) — Phone keyboards and chatbots predict which words are most likely to come next. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/9/) — A chatbot has no body, so it cannot taste chocolate, smell flowers or feel tired. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/10/) — Nobody typed the chatbot's answers in one by one; each answer is produced fresh when you ask. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/11/) — An AI that learned what cats look like can be fooled by something fluffy and cat-shaped, such as a slipper. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/12/) — When a chatbot describes its weekend or its picnic, it is making up a story, because it has no weekends. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/13/) — Small AI programs hide in everyday things, such as phone cameras that sharpen photos and blur backgrounds. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/14/) — AI in films, with robots that make wicked plans of their own, is invented to be exciting; real AI is programs built and run by people. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/15/) — A robot vacuum cleaner uses sensors and a map to do one job; it does not understand the world the way a dog does. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/1-what-is-ai/16/) — AI is good at the usual cases it has seen many times and often weak at unusual or brand-new ones. - next →: [How a language model learns: guessing the next word](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/2-guessing-the-next-word/) - ↑ back to [AI](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/)