What is the difference between supervised and unsupervised machine learning?

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. Machine learning, the subset of artificial intelligence that teaches computers to perform tasks through examples and experience, is a hot area of research and development. Many of the applications we use daily use machine learning algorithms, including AI assistants, web search and machine translation. Your social media news feed is powered by a machine learning algorithm. The recommended videos you see on YouTube and Netflix are the result of a machine learning model.