Your spam filter is AI. So what isn't? | How AI Works · S6, Ep 1

Say AI to five people, and you might get five different pictures. A chatbot that writes your emails. The app that steers you around traffic. A robot villain from a film. The filter that quietly binned your spam this morning. Are those all the same thing? Episode 1 of How AI Works from Aussie Science Clips: What's actually going on inside the AI everyone is talking about: how a machine learns, how a chatbot writes a sentence and makes a picture, and why it sometimes gets things confidently wrong. Full transcript, sources and every episode: https://aussiescience.com/how-ai-work... CHAPTERS 0:00 The question 0:26 A proposal, 1955 0:55 Every aspect of learning 1:27 Why that name? 1:52 A goal, not a gadget 2:30 Is Fred still a person? 3:16 A chatbot made of rules 3:55 A robot that planned its route 4:23 A guess that saves work 5:01 Route two: learn from examples 5:26 Deep learning 5:55 Making, not sorting 6:38 Large language models 7:18 Agents 7:46 The nest 8:20 The word keeps moving 8:59 Just brute force 9:35 AI under other names 10:18 Many don't notice 10:48 Is it intelligent? 11:38 The season ahead NEXT: How can a computer learn without being told the rules? SOURCES 1. J. McCarthy, M. L. Minsky, N. Rochester, C. E. Shannon, A Proposal for the Dartmouth… — http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/hi... 2. Nils J. Nilsson, The Quest for Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge University Press,… — https://ai.stanford.edu/~nilsson/QAI/... 3. John McCarthy, review of The Question of Artificial Intelligence (B. Bloomfield, ed.) — http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/re... 4. Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville, Deep Learning (MIT Press, 2016), ch. 1… — https://www.deeplearningbook.org/cont... 5. Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, preface — https://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/preface.... 6. OECD.AI, Updates to the OECD's definition of an AI system explained (29 November 2023) — https://oecd.ai/en/wonk/ai-system-def... 7. Wikipedia, Cyc — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc 8. Wikipedia, ELIZA — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA 9. Joseph Weizenbaum, ELIZA: a computer program for the study of natural language… — https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365153... 10. Melanie Mitchell and David C. Krakauer, The Debate Over Understanding in AI's Large… — https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13966 11. SRI International, Shakey the Robot — https://www.sri.com/hoi/shakey-the-ro... 12. Wikipedia, A-star search algorithm — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_sear... 13. IBM, Early games (Arthur Samuel's checkers) — https://www.ibm.com/history/early-games 14. A. L. Samuel, Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers, IBM Journal… — https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/... 15. A. Krizhevsky, I. Sutskever, G. E. Hinton, ImageNet Classification with Deep… — https://papers.nips.cc/paper_files/pa... 16. NIST AI 600-1, Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework: Generative… — https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ai/... 17. Black Forest Labs, FLUX.1 [schnell] model card — https://huggingface.co/black-forest-l... 18. Anthropic, Claude — https://www.anthropic.com/claude 19. OpenAI, ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue (30 November 2022, archived copy) — http://web.archive.org/web/2022120201... 20. Wikipedia, List of large language models (accessed 15 October 2026) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of... 21. S. Yao et al., ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models (arXiv, 6… — https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03629 22. Wikipedia, Generative AI (accessed 16 October 2026) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generat... 23. Larry Tesler, Adages and Coinages (Tesler's Theorem, ca. 1970) — https://www.nomodes.com/larry-tesler-... 24. IBM, Deep Blue (IBM history) — https://www.ibm.com/history/deep-blue 25. Google Workspace blog, Ridding Gmail of 100 million more spam messages with TensorFlow… — https://workspace.google.com/blog/pro... …full list of all 30 sources in the pinned comment. HOW THIS WAS MADE Researched and scripted with AI assistance, then fact-checked claim by claim against the sources above by a separate AI pass. Narration is two synthetic Inworld voices. Diagrams are drawn in code (Manim); atmospheric images are AI-generated (FLUX) and are illustrations, not footage. No real person is depicted. Spotted an error? Tell us in the comments and we'll correct it.