You interacted with AI before you opened this page. Autocorrect finished your words, your feed chose your videos, your camera smoothed your photos, your maps predicted traffic. AI is infrastructure now — like electricity, it’s everywhere and invisible.
Spot the pattern-matcher
- Recommendation systems: "people like you watched…" → pattern-matching on millions of users.
- Spam filters: millions of labeled emails taught it what junk looks like.
- Face unlock: a model trained on faces turns pixels into "this is you".
- Voice assistants: speech → text → intent → action, each step a model.
Because AI is invisible, we forget to question it. Engineers have a saying: "If you’re not paying attention to the model, the model is making decisions for you." Part of AI literacy is noticing where AI sits in your day.