Smart machines

Thanks to AI…

… Spotify can recommend songs you might like.

… you can chat with an AI friend on Snapchat.

… you can watch videos specifically For You on TikTok.

… ChatGPT can answer all your (legal) questions.

… Netflix knows what you like to watch.

… Google Maps knows how long your journey will take.

… your mailbox can recognise spam.

… Google knows which search results are most relevant to you.

AI

AI, artificial intelligence, smart machines… they’re all more or less the same thing. AI enables computers, robots and other machines to perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence.

Such as: ‘Tell me something about this photo’ or ‘Make up a song about grumpy cats’. Often, computers with AI can even learn things on their own. This is what is called “machine learning”. The way they learn is comparable to the way you learn.

The way you learn

• As a child, you have learnt to recognise something – a dog, for instance – by looking at it. Your parents would say, ‘That’s a dog’.

• Your brain would then try to work out what makes a dog a dog. Ears sticking up or floppy ears, whiskers, usually four legs,…

• You can now recognise a dog as well as anyone. Skilful!

The way a computer learns with AI

• A computer learns to recognise a dog by being given lots of examples, such as photos of dogs. The examples or the information from which the computer learns are what we call data.

• The computer then tries to figure out what makes a dog a dog. It looks for similarities and differences – in other words, for patterns. It does this using mathematical formulas or algorithms.

• The computer can now recognise dogs. If you show it another photo of a dog, you’ll get a result: ‘I’m 95% sure that this is a dog.’ Useful!

Okay, so you’ve been able to do that for almost your entire life, and you’re usually 100% sure. But the fact that a computer can do it is pretty impressive, don’t you think? Depending on what you teach it, of course, it can do more than identify dogs.