California State University Long Beach (CSULB) supports the responsible and ethical use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for enhancing teaching, learning, research, and campus services.

What is AI?

Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI, has been around since the 60s when the first neural network was developed. Since then, AI has been used in various software and industries like virtual assistants (Siri and Alexa), stock trading, content creation tools (Microsoft Office and Google Suite), and video games. Within the past few years, a new form of AI, known as general AI, has been released and is currently spreading to many facets of society like the workplace and education.

AI technology is a predictive algorithm that picks the best possible answer for a question based on machine learning of data that the software provides. AI finds the best option by looking for patterns in the data to find the closest match. To further train the AI towards finding the optimal answer their response is either rewarded or punished via feedback from a human. Answers that are rewarded are provided more often. For general AI tools like ChatGPT, the data that the algorithm is trained on is raw data from the internet and documents that users upload like academic papers or spreadsheets. The AI is able to replicate human conversation through being trained on human correspondence found on the internet.

See also this article by IBM: What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?