artificial intelligence
Americannoun
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the capacity of a computer, robot, programmed device, or software application to perform operations and tasks analogous to learning and decision making in humans, such as speech recognition or question answering. AI, A.I.
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a computer, robot, programmed device, or software application having this humanlike capacity: AI, A.I.
teaching human values to artificial intelligences.
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the branch of computer science involved with the design of computers, robots, programmed devices, and software applications having the capacity to imitate human intelligence and thought. AI, A.I.
noun
Closer Look
The goal of research on artificial intelligence is to understand the nature of thought and intelligent behavior and to design intelligent systems. A computer is not really intelligent; it just follows directions very quickly. At the same time, it is the speed and memory of modern computers that allows researchers to manage the huge quantities of data necessary to model human thought and behavior. An intelligent machine would be more flexible than a computer and would engage in the kind of “thinking” that people actually do. An example is vision. In theory, a network of sensors combined with systems for interpreting the data could produce the kind of pattern recognition that we take for granted as seeing and understanding what we see. In fact, developing software that can recognize subtle differences in objects (such as those we use to recognize human faces) is very difficult. The recognition of differences that we can perceive without deliberate effort would require massive amounts of data and elaborate guidelines to be recognized by an artificial intelligence system. According to the famous Turing Test, proposed in 1950 by British mathematician and logician Alan Turing, a machine would be considered intelligent if it could convince human observers that another human, rather than a machine, was answering their questions in conversation.
Etymology
Origin of artificial intelligence
First recorded in 1955–60
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
But there is also a twist in the tale caused by the very tool that you might think would speed things up: Artificial Intelligence.
From BBC • May 20, 2026
Palantir’s new positioning set it up to benefit from the gold rush into AI: Its stock is up around 1,600% since it unveiled its Artificial Intelligence Platform.
From The Wall Street Journal • May 9, 2026
Last month, the University of Wisconsin-Madison also received $100 million in donations for a new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence.
From Los Angeles Times • May 5, 2026
"With Artificial Intelligence, though, it feels more extreme," she added, noting that Moreno-Gama was radicalized through the "'AI existential risk' rhetoric" rather than its employment or environmental impacts.
From Barron's • Apr. 29, 2026
The Task Force also convinced the court that a piece of AT&T software that Shadowhawk had illicitly copied from Bell Labs, the "Artificial Intelligence C5 Expert System," was worth a cool one million dollars.
From The Hacker Crackdown, law and disorder on the electronic frontier by Sterling, Bruce
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
