“Artificial intelligence” is a catch-all term that encompasses a wide range of machine learning technologies that use large data sets – collections of information – to make predictions or conclusions.

AI can be classified as Narrow, General, and Super. You may also hear the term “weak AI” to describe Narrow AI, which is where AI is designed to complete a specific task. All AI we can access currently is Narrow, or weak. In the world of artificial intelligence, General and Super AI are still just theoretical. The idea is that General and Super — also called “strong AI” — would be comparable (General) and superior (Super) to human intelligence as we know it now. Weak AI does not have consciousness or self-awareness and it doesn’t understand tone or feeling (though we’re pretty good at making a tool like Siri seem like it does) and it isn’t sentient.

“Generative AI” is the class of tools where the AI doesn’t make decisions or predictions but instead appears to create – or generate! – something like an image, a paragraph, a video, or a sound file.