An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

How many times have you used AI today? If you checked your phone, streamed music, or used autocomplete, you were using AI.

An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence is a guided tour of the field for teen readers, written in plain language and illustrated throughout. It begins with the definitions researchers actually use and ends with the questions nobody has answered yet.

Inside:

What AI really is: four ways the field has been defined, the idea of an intelligent agent, and the four schools of thought that divide researchers, thinking rationally, acting rationally, thinking humanly, and acting humanly.

Alan Turing: the British mathematician and codebreaker widely considered the father of AI, his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," and the Turing Test that still shapes how we judge machine intelligence.

Where AI shows up today: computer vision in self-driving cars and medical imaging, natural language processing behind spam filters and ChatGPT, voice assistants, robotics, route planning, and games as AI's training ground, from Arthur Samuel's checkers program to AlphaGo.

Eighty years of history: the artificial neuron of 1943, the Dartmouth Conference of 1956, the perceptron, SHRDLU, Shakey the robot, two AI winters, expert systems, the machine learning revolution, deep learning, and the arrival of large language models.

The ethical questions ahead: interpretability and the black box problem, bias in training data, fair AI, AI education, and the questions nobody has settled. How will AI impact our jobs, cities, and laws? Should we be afraid of AI? Is AI a threat to humankind? What do YOU think?

Plus a glossary of more than forty terms, from backpropagation to stochastic parrots.

Written by Ansaf Salleb-Aouissi, who teaches artificial intelligence at Columbia University, and Uzay Macar, an AI researcher at Anthropic; illustrated by Noah Laurence; and published by Aiphabet, a nonprofit working to make AI education available to all students, regardless of nationality, race, class, or gender.

The future isn't written. It depends on the generation of people now learning what AI actually is. That's you.

Start your next chapter at aiphabet.org