Glossary
The tricky words, explained simply.
A
- Agent
- An AI that doesn’t just reply but takes actions on your behalf: searches the web, fills in forms, uses other programs.
- AI assistant
- A program you “chat” with by typing or speaking: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Copilot and similar. It replies by generating text (and sometimes images or code).
- Appears in: What an AI assistant really is
- AI Fluency
- The ability to work with AI in ways that are effective, efficient, ethical and safe. It’s not about knowing the tech, but about working well with it.
- Appears in: AI Fluency: the 4 skills that matter
B
- Bias
- A skewed tendency in the answers, inherited from the texts the AI learned from. For example assuming a doctor is a man.
- Appears in: Discernment: trust, but with judgement
C
- Context window
- The chat’s “short-term memory”: how much text the AI can keep in mind in one conversation. In a very long chat, the oldest parts may be forgotten.
- Appears in: What an AI assistant really is
H
- Hallucination
- When the AI writes something false in a confident tone: a made-up number, a quote that never existed, a broken link.
- Appears in: What an AI assistant really is
K
- Knowledge cutoff
- The point when the model stopped “studying”. It knows nothing about later events unless it can search the web.
- Appears in: What an AI assistant really is
L
- Language model (LLM)
- The “engine” inside the assistant. A program that has read huge amounts of text and learned to predict which word comes next.
- Appears in: What an AI assistant really is
M
- Multimodal
- An assistant that understands not just text, but also photos, documents, audio or voice.
- Appears in: What an AI assistant really is
P
- Prompt
- What you write to the assistant: your question or request. The clearer it is, the better the answer.
- Appears in: Description: getting your point across
T
- Temperature
- How much the AI “takes risks” when choosing words. Low: predictable answers. High: more varied and creative answers (but also odder ones).
- Token
- A small piece of text (a word, or part of one). The AI reads and writes one token at a time.
- Appears in: What an AI assistant really is
- Training
- The phase in which the model learns by reading text. It doesn’t learn from you during the chat, unless the service uses conversations to improve (check the settings!).
- Appears in: What an AI assistant really is