The words, in plain English

Every AI term you keep hearing, explained the way a friend would — with everyday examples instead of jargon.

AI Overviews

AI Overviews is Google's name for the AI-written summaries that sometimes appear at the very top of Google search results, before the regular links. Instead of showing you a list of websites to click, Google's AI reads those websites and writes a short answer for you. It's handy for quick questions, but the summary can sometimes be wrong, so it's worth scrolling down to check the source links.

AI detector

An AI detector is a tool that tries to figure out whether a piece of writing, an image, or a video was made by AI or by a human. These tools look for patterns that AI tends to produce. They're not very reliable — they make mistakes in both directions, flagging real human writing as AI or missing real AI content — so you shouldn't treat their verdict as definitive proof.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence is when a computer is built to do things that normally require human thinking — like understanding language, recognizing faces, or making decisions. It's not a robot brain; it's software trained on huge amounts of data so it can spot patterns and respond in useful ways. AI is already in things you use every day, from spam filters in your email to the voice assistant on your phone.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a popular AI chatbot made by a company called OpenAI. You type a question or request, and it writes back a human-like response — it can answer questions, summarize articles, write emails, or help brainstorm ideas. It's free to try at chat.openai.com, with a paid version that adds extra features.

Chatbot

A chatbot is a computer program you can have a text conversation with, like chatting with a person online. Older chatbots could only answer a set list of questions, like a phone menu. Newer AI chatbots — powered by large language models — can understand almost any question you type and reply in plain, natural sentences.

Deepfake

A deepfake is a photo, video, or audio clip where AI has replaced or altered someone's face, voice, or both to make it look like they said or did something they never did. The word blends 'deep learning' (the AI technique used) and 'fake.' Deepfakes range from harmless fun — like swapping faces in a movie — to seriously harmful, like fake videos designed to spread lies about real people.

Generative AI

Generative AI is a type of AI that creates new content — text, images, audio, video, or code — instead of just answering yes-or-no questions or sorting data. When you ask ChatGPT to write a birthday message, or ask an AI image tool to draw a sunset, that's generative AI at work. It generates something new based on patterns it learned from massive amounts of existing content.

Hallucination

In AI, a hallucination is when an AI chatbot confidently states something that is completely made up. It might invent a fake news article, cite a book that doesn't exist, or give you a wrong phone number — all while sounding totally certain. It happens because the AI is very good at generating plausible-sounding text, but it doesn't actually 'know' facts the way a person does. Always double-check important information from an AI.

Large language model (LLM)

A large language model is the AI engine behind most modern chatbots, including ChatGPT. It learned from an enormous amount of text — books, websites, articles — and got very good at predicting what word should come next, which lets it write and talk in a natural, human-like way. 'Large' refers to the sheer amount of data it was trained on and the computing power it took to build.

Machine learning

Machine learning is the way AI gets smart — by practicing. Instead of a programmer writing out every rule, the computer looks at thousands or millions of examples and figures out the patterns on its own. For example, a machine-learning system learns to spot spam email by reading millions of spam and non-spam messages until it can tell the difference. Most AI you use today is powered by machine learning.

Prompt

A prompt is the message or question you type into an AI tool to tell it what you want. Think of it like giving instructions to a very capable assistant — the clearer and more specific your instructions, the better the result you get back. For example, instead of typing just 'recipe,' you might type 'Give me a simple pasta recipe for two people with no dairy.'

Voice cloning

Voice cloning is when AI listens to a recording of someone's voice — even a short clip — and learns to copy it, so it can say anything in that same voice. It sounds real enough to fool people on the phone. Scammers use it to impersonate family members in distress. Legitimate uses include helping people who have lost their voice due to illness.