AI & Digital Skills
AI buzzword dictionary
The AI words you keep hearing, explained without jargon. Each entry gives a short definition, what it really means, an everyday example and anything to be careful about.
- Artificial intelligence (AI)
- Computer systems that perform tasks we normally associate with human thinking, such as recognising speech, sorting images or writing text.
- Generative AI
- AI that creates new content — text, images, audio, video or code — in response to an instruction.
- Large language model (LLM)
- A type of AI trained on huge amounts of text to predict and generate language.
- Prompt
- The instruction or question you give an AI tool.
- Token
- A small chunk of text — often part of a word — that language models read and write.
- Context window
- The maximum amount of text a model can take into account at one time.
- Hallucination
- When an AI confidently produces information that is false or made up.
- AI agent
- An AI system that can take a series of actions towards a goal, not just answer a single question.
- RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)
- A method where an AI first looks up relevant documents, then uses them to write its answer.
- API (application programming interface)
- A defined way for one piece of software to request data or actions from another.
- Machine learning
- A way of building AI where a computer learns patterns from examples rather than following hand-written rules.
- Multimodal AI
- AI that can work with more than one type of input or output, such as text, images, audio and video.
- Training data
- The examples used to teach an AI model — text, images, recordings or records.
- Deepfake
- Realistic fake video, audio or images of real people, made with AI.
Last reviewed: 25 September 2026