Understanding the concept of artificial intelligence

The European Parliament (external link, opens in a new window) defines Artificial Intelligence as "[...] the ability of a machine to imitate human abilities such as reasoning, learning, planning and creativity. AI enables technical systems to perceive their environment, deal with what they perceive and solve problems in order to achieve a specific goal. [...] AI systems are able to adapt their actions by analysing the consequences of previous actions and working autonomously."

In the context of this guide, our understanding of artificial intelligence is that computerised systems perform tasks that usually require human intelligence - such as understanding, processing and generating texts, recognising patterns or making (provisional) decisions.

Accordingly, this guideline refers in particular to the use of generative AI, i.e. tools that can generate new content such as texts, images, code or language (cf. Kalota, 2024).

AI systems acquire these capabilities through training on extensive, human-generated data. This also includes user input into the AI system, such as prompts or file uploads. It is therefore crucial that only content that is harmless in terms of data protection and copyright is fed into AI systems (see compliance with data protection and copyright), as this information can potentially be used to (further) develop new models.

Examples of such tools are

• Language-based AI such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude,
• Language and translation services such as DeepL,
• Image and media generators such as DALL-E or Midjourney,
• as well as AI-based assistance systems in Office applications such as Microsoft Copilot.