What AI Is (and Isn't)

"Artificial intelligence" gets applied to everything from a spam filter to a chatbot that writes poetry, which makes it easy to lose track of what we're really talking about. The key distinctions matter: generative AI creates new content while traditional AI classifies and predicts. Narrow AI handles specific tasks while general AI - still hypothetical - would handle anything a human can. Some systems follow fixed rules; others learn from data. Some give the same answer every time; others are probabilistic, producing different outputs on different runs. Getting clear on these differences is genuinely useful. It helps you evaluate products honestly, read past marketing claims, and understand why the same technology can be impressive in one context and unreliable in another. It also helps you recognise what AI is not: it's not magic, it's not sentient, and it's not always the right tool for the job.