The short version
AI (artificial intelligence) is software that improves by learning from examples.
Instead of being told every rule, the model studies many examples and finds patterns. Then it uses those patterns to predict, classify, or create.
A concrete example
Show a model 10,000 labeled photos of cats and dogs. After studying them, it can guess the label of a new photo it has never seen. That is learning from data.
What AI is not
- It does not think the way you do.
- It does not understand in your sense.
- It makes good guesses, sometimes wrong ones.
That's the honest starting point. Everything else builds on it.