Content area
Full Text
The term artificial intelligence (AI) is well known but often misunderstood. To the average person, AI may conjure science-fiction images of an allknowing entity that has superior cognitive abilities in comparison to humans. This imagery plays on the idea of an artificial general intelligence, technology that is still years away (Haenlein & Kaplan, 2019). Today, AI falls into what experts call narrow AI; AI designed for a specific purpose or task (Haenlein & Kaplan, 2019). While AI experts agree on the general versus narrow AI macrolevel categorization, discussion still exists on the best way to categorize and describe both what AI currently is and is not at the microlevel (West, 2018). This complicates the dissemination of AI's definition to other fields of nonexperts. Within education, researchers have frequently failed to define AI in their work. In a recent literature review of higher education research on artificial intelligence, Zawacki-Richter et al. (2019) found that only 5 out of 146 (3.4%) articles clearly defined the concept of AI in their studies. The lack of emphasis on defining and communicating AI's conceptual boundaries contributes to misunderstanding and intimidation around the term for many, including those in education. In this article we introduce various definitions of AI, discuss emerging conceptual frameworks for AI in education, and explain why definitions of AI matter for online educators.
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
Although Alan Turing is often credited with the general concept of AI, John McCarthy was the first to coin and define the term in the mid-1950s (McCarthy, 2007; West, 2018). McCarthy's (2007) definition of AI is "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs" (p. 2). Within the education literature, Baker and Smith (2019) defined AI as a computer that performs cognitive tasks. But what does "intelligent" and "cognitive" mean in practice and why define a concept so broadly? Baker and Smith (2019) noted that they purposefully defined AI broadly because it "does not describe a single technology," but instead is made up of a variety of techniques, most recognizably machine learning (p. 10).
AI differs from traditional computer programming in the fact that the computer system does not simply stick to rules written by a developer. The computer is programmed in a way that allows...