Your teenager is using terms like "prompt engineering," "hallucination," and "fine-tuning" in everyday conversation. School assignments reference "large language models" and "generative AI." You want to keep up — or at least understand what's being discussed. Here are the key terms, explained the way you'd explain them to a knowledgeable friend.
Essential Terms
Artificial Intelligence (AI) — A broad term for computer systems designed to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as understanding language, recognizing images, or making recommendations.
Machine Learning (ML) — A type of AI where systems learn from data rather than following explicitly programmed rules. Most modern AI is built on machine learning.
Large Language Model (LLM) — The technology behind AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. LLMs are trained on vast amounts of text and generate responses by predicting the most likely next words based on patterns in their training data.
Generative AI — AI systems that generate new content — text, images, audio, video — rather than just classifying or analyzing existing content.
Prompt — The text input you give to an AI system. How you phrase your prompt significantly affects the quality and type of response you get.
Hallucination — When an AI system produces information that sounds confident and plausible but is factually incorrect. This is a known limitation of current AI systems.
Training Data — The examples an AI system learned from. The quality, diversity, and accuracy of training data directly affects the AI's capabilities and limitations.
Bias — Systematic errors in AI outputs that reflect imbalances or prejudices in the training data. AI systems can reflect and amplify biases present in the data they were trained on.
Why Knowing the Terms Matters
You don't need to be able to build an AI system to help your child use these tools responsibly. But knowing the vocabulary means you can participate in the conversation — at the dinner table, with your child's teachers, and in your own decision-making about which AI tools your family uses and how.
