AI-ght, What's All This Then?

Jarvis, please pull up some quick articles to teach me about AI…Jarvis? Oh wait, my bad, I forgot that you're not real outside of Marvel. Please excuse me, I'm just going to go sob in the corner while Siri tells me she "didn't quite get that" in an endless, torturous loop. If you're the singular person on Earth who has never seen an MCU movie and you didn't quite get that, absolutely no worries (but I hope you move to a more exciting rock soon)! I'm messing with you, here's the rundown: J.A.R.V.I.S. is a fictional AI system created by billionaire genius Tony Stark, essentially a virtual assistant that can do anything from making predictions from enormous piles of data to mimicking human language (and occasionally cracking a joke), which we'll soon see is harder than it seems! Right now, some of you may be thinking WTF (Well, That's Fantastic), but I don't know what this has to do with anything? If you haven't already guessed it, today we are going to be learning about AI, i.e. Artificial Intelligence (which is what our dear J.A.R.V.I.S. is)! Let's get right into it: what exactly is AI?