Question: On tv, artificial intelligence usually seems to be portrayed as talking computers-who recognise speech and can reply to it. Is this stereotype even correct and what do you think of it?

Joanna Bryson answered on 20 Jun 2013:

Any machine you can talk to is certainly AI! But there’s a lot more to AI than that. Any machine that can sense the world around it and respond to it by changing it is a robot. Even if it’s just a little change like those robot flowers that dance when you play music at them. They are robots, just pretty simple ones.

But language is a big part of what makes humans especially smart. We can communicate our ideas faster (and make new ones!) than any other animal. So AI with language is very important, a very important tool.

It is important though to realise that when you see AI in fiction — in a book or on TV — then a human writer has written it as a character. It has some purpose to the plot, and probably the writer has made it more like a human than a machine really would be. Some robots you see in museums (or AI characters you see in computer games) are like that took — a writer has just written down all their possible things they can say, then they just use AI to guess which of those things you want to hear from what you have asked.