glossary.

AI is the huge field of getting computers to perform tasks that used to only be performed with real (mostly human) intelligence. This can include recognising images, understanding language, finding patterns, making predictions, or planning actions. AI has been around for several decades and is thought to have been born in the 1950s, but many of its underlying ideas are much older. The span of AI includes rules-based systems, machine learning, computer vision, robotics, and generative AI. The very recent breakthrough is generative AI (or Gen AI), which is often what people mean when they say AI. Generative AI can create text, images, audio, video, and software when prompted by a human, and often takes the form of a chat interface.

All of the inputs an AI model has ingested during training and testing. Inputs could be images, data, text, audio, or songs. These can be structured, like labelled rows of data, or unstructured, like a folder of random images. What gets added into a model's corpus has implications for that model's future performance, accuracy, and bias. Garbage in, garbage out starts here and bias too. Not all AI corpora were gathered with permission. Court cases are now emerging where authors, creators, artists, and publishers are bringing claims against major AI labs for copyright infringement arguing their works were taken and ingested into model training without their permission.