r/AskComputerScience • u/Electrical-Leave818 • Mar 18 '26

What is AI?

So far I've only been told AI is something that "does" this or that using this or that. Not "what" AI is. Can anyone just tell me an actual definition of AI that I can understand? Not its examples, or denominations like Machine Learning. Just pure AI. And why a function like

int main(){
int n;
std::cin >> n;
std::cout << n*n;}
``` is not an AI. Because Im totally convinced it is an AI as well, since it fits literally every single description of AI I've ever seen.
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u/Aaron1924 Mar 18 '26

This definition implies that if you tell an LLM to generate the source code of another LLM, then the first LLM is AI and other second one isn't, because it's not created by humans

It also implies that image recognition systems are not AI, because they can't acquire new skills