The Curious Companion: Ep. 7 – What is AI?

ByMaestro

Curious Reader!

Welcome to this week’s ChatGPT Curious companion newsletter.

What you came for is below, and you can CLICK HERE to listen to the episode if you decide you prefer earbuds to eyeballs.

Happy reading!

This episode is about giving you a clear, simple definition of a word that gets thrown around constantly: AI. You’re hearing it in every commercial, on every app, and in every new feature rollout. But what is it, really? I share a plain-language definition — “software that can guess” — contrast everyday examples of AI with simple automation, and give quick context on where the term came from, how regulating agencies define it, what is meant by “agents” and “AGI”, and how close we realistically are to what Terminator predicted. (Spoiler, not close at all.)

If You’re Feeling Lost

Totally fine. I know I can get technical when I talk about this stuff (shoutout to my friend Diana who listened to Ep 1 and said she was lost, BUT also said, “I know it’s math.” Honestly, that’s a win!).

A couple options for you if things feel fuzzy:

  • Re-read these Companions and re-listen to the podcasts episodes. I do this all the time with stuff that I consume.
  • Reach out with questions!
    • Hit reply to these emails
    • Text me 310-737-2345
    • DM me @themovementmaestro
    • Formally submit a question at: chatgptcurious.com/contact/

Let’s Start with: “AI is…”

Last week I posted a question box to my IG Stories that asked people to complete the sentence, “AI is…”. I was hoping to have them describe AI, but instead, most folks responded with how AI makes them feel. Not wrong, just not what I was asking. Either way, the responses were HUGELY eye opening.

Some examples of what folks said:

  • Scary
  • Overwhelming
  • The death of humanity
  • The devil
  • Making humans dumber

All fair. But… how you gonna fight something you don’t know what it is? How you gonna challenge something if all you know is that you hate it? How you gonna changes something if all you know is that you’re scared of it?

My rhetorical question back to them: Are you scared of the tech… or scared of the people in charge of the tech?

The Definition I Want You to Hold Onto

In an effort to get everyone on the same page, I want to share a very colloquial, very usable definition that ChatGPT and I came up with:

  • AI is software that can guess.

A Slightly more nuanced definition:

  • Software that can make guesses based on a pattern map that it has created.

If that’s all you walk away with today, I’m happy.

What Is AI vs What Is Just Automation

Examples tend to elucidate, so I figured I’d go through a few examples of things we commonly use that both are and are not AI.

✅ Things That Are AI
​ These systems infer, they guess, they generate.

  • Instagram ”for you” feed – Guesses which posts will keep you scrolling.
  • Gmail Smart Compose – Guesses the next words in your email.
  • Grammarly / spell-check (modern versions) – Guesses grammar fixes and rewrites using language models.
  • Google Home speech-to-intent – Voice recognition + intent parsing. It uses neural nets to transcribe speech and guess what you mean.
  • Spotify recommendations – Guesses what songs you’ll want next.
  • iPhone Face ID – Guesses if the pixels in front of the camera match your faceprint.

❌ Things That Aren’t AI
​ These are rules and timers (think: Automation). No guessing involved.

  • Old-school spell-check – Just checks your word against a dictionary.
  • Google Calendar reminders – Simple rule: “at 2pm, ping me.”
  • Email autoresponders (classic) – Sends a pre-written reply, no inference.
  • Smart lights on schedule – “If 7pm → turn on.”
  • Google Home carrying out or executing commands – Automation; turning on the lights once it knows your intent.

Why the Word “AI” Took Off

Let’s give you a little background on the term “AI”, because why not.

AI stands for Artificial Intelligence and was first used in 1955 by one of the founding figures of computer science, John McCarthy.

He co-authored a proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence that would take place in 1956. In the actual proposal, they wrote:

“The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”

Key word: simulate. This wasn’t about saying machines have intelligence. It was a bet: If you could describe intelligence well enough, machines could imitate it.

Also worth noting:

  • They needed funding. “Artificial intelligence” sounded futuristic and fundable.
  • The word was contested even then. Some peers at the time preferred terms like “complex information processing” or “statistical pattern recognition.” But “artificial intelligence” stuck because it was punchy.
  • They were signaling a break. Before Dartmouth, work in this area was called cybernetics. “Artificial intelligence” gave it a fresh identity and made it sound like a new discipline.

Translation: “AI” has been a marketing buzzword since day 1.

What the Adults in the Room Say

We do have official definitions now. One to know, that is from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development; an intergovernmental org based with 38 member countries and based in Paris):

OECD (2024):

“An AI system is a machine-based system that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments. Different AI systems vary in their levels of autonomy and adaptiveness after deployment.”

The important word there: infers. It’s not magic. It’s systems inferring, aka making pattern-based guesses.

What About AI Agents?

This is the new kid on the block that has all the tech companies trying to make fetch happen: Agentic AI.

I first brought up agents and agentic AI episode 4. If you haven’t read or listened to that yet, here ya go:

Agentic AI refers to AI that uses agents. So, wtf is an agent?

  • Agents: AI that doesn’t just answer questions, it can do stuff for you. You give it some guardrails and it figures out how to do it so you spend less time telling it exactly what to do.
  • Translation: AI that has some autonomy.

Example: You could say “Help me prep for my podcast guest next Thursday.” An AI agent connected to your email + calendar might:

  • Find the booking
  • Scan past emails with the guest
  • Pull their bio from your files
  • Suggest questions based on recent news
  • Block prep time on your calendar

You didn’t walk it through each step. It took initiative within the rules.

When we take a moment and understand that this is all based on math, and probabilities, and algorithms…suddenly it’s like, “Huh that’s pretty complex, can it actually do all that?”

This is where the wheels often fall off and in practice we start to see how brittle these systems are and how performance drops off, especially as task complexity rises.

AI can do some really cool shit, but we’re not nearly as advanced as the AI marketers would have you believe.

Zooming Way Out: AGI

The ultimate level of autonomous AI is what has been labeled AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). It is the holy grail of what’s being chased right now, and we are even farther from achieving (think decades). It is SkyNet (where my Terminator fans at?)

  • AGI = Artificial General Intelligence = AI that can understand, learn, and perform any intellectual task a human can, across different domains, not just the narrow things it was trained for.

Again, we are not close to having this.

Current narrow AI (what ChatGPT is) can generate impressive outputs within specific tasks it was trained on, but it can’t transfer that ability to a new context, reason flexibly, or make sense of the world the way a human can.

We’ve got a long way to go.

What I Want You to Walk Away With

I want you to understand, at least at a rudimentary level, what is going on under the hood so that you can be an informed consumer.

  • AI is math.
  • AI is software that guesses.
  • AI is overhyped and you’re going to continue seeing it used in marketing more and more.
  • Everything’s being stuffed with “AI”, and that often just means it can use natural language inputs (you can type/say regular sentences) and it will generate an output.
  • AI cannot understand the world or act with independent agency, making decisions and completing tasks like a human would.

Want to know if it’s actually AI? Ask ChatGPT.
​If you’re unsure if something is AI or what makes something AI, ask ChatGPT. Even better: ask whether or not it can actually do what it says it can do.

Don’t get fooled by (or scared by) the magic show.

It’s math. It’s probability. It’s software that guesses.

How I Used ChatGPT Recently

Each episode I include a section where I briefly discuss how I used ChatGPT that day/week.

This week I used ChatGPT to help remove the front casing of the bulkhead light fixture that sits above our front steps. I consider myself pretty handy but had no idea how to take the cover off so I could change the lightbulb.

So I took a picture of the entire light and asked ChatGPT: How do I change the bulb in this light? I thought it would be as simple as removing the front two screws but that only seems to remove the wire face plate thing. Not sure how the glass under it would come off.

The Response: ChatGPT identified the type of light, walked me through exactly how a bulkhead light is built, explained the two main ways the glass cover is usually secured (threaded twist-off vs. clip-mounted), and gave me step-by-step instructions plus a video and forum example. #NailedIT

That’s it for today’s episode. Always grateful for you.

Questions, comments, concerns, additions, subtractions, requests? Hit reply or head to the website (chatgptcurious.com) and use that contact form. I’d love to hear from you.

Catch you next Thursday.

Maestro out.

Feeling curious AND generous? Click here to support the podcast.​

AI Disclaimer: In the spirit of transparency (if only we could get that from these tech companies), this email was generated with a very solid alley-oop from ChatGPT. I write super detailed outlines for every podcast episode (proof here), and then use ChatGPT to turn those into succinct, readable recaps that I lightly edit to produce these Curious Companions. Could I “write” it all by hand? Sure. Do I want to? Absolutely not. So instead, I let the robot do the work, so I can focus on the stuff that I actually enjoy doing and you get the content delivered to your digital doorstep, no AirPods required. High fives all around.

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