What is AI? Concepts & History

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the ability of machines to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence — such as understanding language, recognizing images, making decisions, and learning from data. AI is not new: the term was coined in 1956, but only in the last decade have advances in data, computing power, and algorithms made AI a practical tool for everyone.

• Narrow AI (Weak AI): Designed for a specific task — like ChatGPT, Google Translate, or a spam filter. Most AI today is narrow AI.
• General AI (Strong AI): A machine that can perform any intellectual task a human can. This does not exist yet.
• AI systems learn from data — the more quality data, the better they perform.
• Popular AI applications in 2026 include chatbots, image generators, recommendation systems, and voice assistants.

💡 Practical Skill: Start by identifying AI in your daily life — Facebook recommendations, YouTube auto-captions, Google Search. Try ChatGPT or Gemini to see how AI responds to prompts.

# Simulating a simple AI that detects sentiment from keywordsdef detect_sentiment(text):    positive_words = ["good", "great", "happy", "excellent", "amazing"]    negative_words = ["bad", "terrible", "sad", "poor", "awful"]     text_lower = text.lower()    score = 0     for word in positive_words:        if word in text_lower:            score += 1    for word in negative_words:        if word in text_lower:            score -= 1     if score > 0:        return "Positive sentiment"    elif score < 0:        return "Negative sentiment"    else:        return "Neutral sentiment" # Test the AIprint(detect_sentiment("This course is great and amazing!"))  # Positiveprint(detect_sentiment("The service was terrible and poor."))  # Negativeprint(detect_sentiment("The meeting is at 3pm."))             # Neutral