AIGP - Understanding the foundations of AI governance - Section 1.1

Know the generally accepted definitions and types of AI, and identify the risks and harms AI poses to individuals, groups, organisations and society.

Define AI, machine learning, and related terms, and distinguish the main categories of AI system. Recognise how risks such as ethics and bias harm individuals, groups, organisations, and society differently.

AI definitionsAI risk typesethics and bias riskAI harms

Practice question for this objective

Free sampleUnderstanding the foundations of AI governanceeasy

The OECD and EU AI Act definitions of an AI system state that, having been deployed, such a system may exhibit adaptiveness. In conceptual terms, what does adaptiveness describe within these definitions?

  • AThe system can run on a range of hardware platforms, from a handheld device to a data-centre server, without its code being rewritten.
  • BThe system can accept several input formats, such as text and images together, and reason across them to produce a single output.
  • CThe system always produces the identical output when given identical input, so its behaviour stays consistent across every run.
  • DThe system may continue to change its behaviour after deployment, for instance by learning from new data it encounters in use. Correct
Adaptiveness in the OECD and EU AI Act AI system definitions means a system may change its behaviour after deployment by learning from new data. The shared definition lists adaptiveness as an optional property because some AI systems keep learning and altering their behaviour in service while others are fixed at deployment; the concept turns on post-deployment behavioural change, not on hardware portability, input formats or deterministic output.

Why A is wrong: Portability across hardware sounds like a flexible, adaptive quality, but it concerns deployment engineering rather than how the system behaves, and the definitions tie adaptiveness to changing behaviour, not changing platforms.

Why B is wrong: Handling multiple input formats describes multimodality, which is a separate concept, so confusing it with adaptiveness is tempting but the definitions reserve adaptiveness for post-deployment behavioural change.

Why C is wrong: Identical outputs for identical inputs describe determinism, which is closer to the opposite of adaptiveness, so this inverts the concept the definitions intend.

Why D is correct: The definitions describe adaptiveness as the capacity for a system, after deployment, to alter its behaviour through ongoing learning, which is why both phrase it as a possible rather than guaranteed property.

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