BLCAI & Ethics
What artificial intelligence actually is, how it learns, and how to use it responsibly.
What is AI?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is software that spots patterns in huge amounts of data and uses them to make decisions or predictions. You already use it every day:
- Spotify / YouTube — recommends songs and videos based on what you've watched before.
- Autocomplete — predicts the next word as you type.
- Face ID — recognises your face to unlock your phone.
How AI learns
Most AI learns from huge amounts of training data — examples it studies to find patterns.
Training data
thousands of examples
AI model
finds patterns
Prediction
a guess, not a fact
AI predictions can be wrong — it's making its best guess based on patterns, not "thinking" the way you do.
Bias in AI
Bias happens when an AI's training data isn't fair or balanced, so its decisions aren't fair either.
Example: a company built an AI tool to help sort job applications. It was trained mostly on data from past applicants who were men, so it learned to unfairly favour male applicants — even though that was never the intention. This shows why the data an AI learns from really matters.
Deepfakes
A deepfake is a fake video, photo or audio clip made by AI to look or sound like a real person doing or saying something they never actually did.
How to spot one: unnatural blinking or facial movement, mismatched lip-syncing, strange lighting or shadows, and audio that sounds slightly robotic or off. If something looks shocking or unbelievable, check another trusted source before you believe it.
5 rules for using AI at school
- Always check AI answers — it can be confidently wrong.
- Never enter personal information into an AI tool.
- Use AI to help you think, not to think for you.
- Say when you've used AI to help with your work.
- If in doubt, ask your teacher before using a new AI tool.
Hallucination
Sometimes AI states something completely made-up as if it were fact — this is called a hallucination. It happens because AI is predicting what sounds right, not checking a database of truth. Always double-check important facts elsewhere.
Try it
Use Microsoft Copilot with your school account: copilot.microsoft.com