Blog- Bewildered by the buzzwords? A plain-English guide to AI

AI has gone from science fiction to everyday life in a few short years. It's in the apps on our phones, the emails we receive and the websites we visit. The vocabulary has arrived just as fast, and it isn't always easy to follow. Here's a quick guide to the terms you're most likely to come across.

Artificial intelligence (AI)
A broad term for computer systems that can do tasks we'd normally associate with human thinking, such as understanding language, recognising images or making predictions. Most of what people mean by "AI" today is a particular kind called generative AI.

Generative AI
AI that creates new content, including text, images, audio and video, in response to a request. It's the technology behind the tools that have made headlines over the past few years.

Large language model (LLM)
The engine behind tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. An LLM is trained on huge amounts of text and learns to predict which words are likely to come next. That makes it remarkably fluent, but fluent isn't the same as correct.

Chatbot
A program you can have a conversation with, typing questions and getting answers back. Many customer service chats on websites are now chatbots, often built on an LLM.

Prompt
The instruction or question you type into an AI tool. The clearer and more specific the prompt, the more useful the answer tends to be.

Hallucination
When an AI confidently produces something that isn't true, such as a made-up statistic, a quote nobody said or a source that doesn't exist. It's one of the main reasons AI output should always be checked.

Training data
The material an AI model learned from, which can include books, websites, images and code. The quality and range of that material shapes what the AI knows and how it behaves.

Compute
The processing power needed to build and run AI, meaning specialist chips, servers and vast data centres. It's a big part of why AI is so expensive to develop and why only a handful of companies build the most advanced models.

Agents
AI systems that don't just answer questions but take actions on your behalf, such as booking appointments, sending emails or filling in forms. They're one of the fastest-developing areas of AI.

Deepfake
AI-generated video, audio or images designed to look or sound like a real person. They can be harmless fun, but they're increasingly used in scams, so it's worth being cautious about unexpected calls or videos, even from familiar voices.

Keeping a clear head
AI can be genuinely useful, but it works best as an assistant, not an authority. It's worth double-checking anything important it tells you, thinking twice before sharing personal information with an AI tool, and treating unexpected messages with healthy scepticism.