AI Fundamentals

main concepts you need to know related to ai

Talking about AI is hard when people in the room mean different things by the same words. This card covers the basic concepts a journalist needs to follow the conversation: what a model is, what training data does, why outputs can be wrong. A shared vocabulary helps a team avoid both hype and needless fear.

Questions to explore

// use these as prompts in a workshop or on your own. There are no right answers.

Which AI terms come up in your newsroom that not everyone can define?
How would you explain to a colleague why an AI model can state something false with confidence?
What does it mean that a model predicts text rather than knowing facts?
Where do the limits of an AI tool come from, and how can you find them?
How much do you need to understand about how a tool works before you rely on it?

Expert voices

// notes from the journalists and AI experts who helped shape this kit

“LLMs are probabilistic, not deterministic: they do not really know anything, they are just very good at predicting the next word. What does that mean for journalism?”

Steffen Leidel, DW Akademie

“AI cannot verify facts independently, understand context the way humans do, make ethical judgments, or replace human accountability. Knowing these boundaries prevents over-reliance.”

Lynn Khellaf, DW

“Teach the stable basics behind fast-changing AI tools. Conceptual foundations stay relevant even when the tools evolve every few months.”

Bahia Albrecht, DW Akademie

“Retrieval augmented generation mirrors the journalistic process: source plus questions. For most journalistic use cases, the core principle is selecting the source and having a reliable process to extract the relevant information.”

Peter Deselaers, DW Akademie

Things to consider

Agree on plain definitions for the few terms you use most often.
Knowing that models can be confidently wrong is more useful than knowing the technical detail.
Understanding the basics helps you ask vendors better questions.

using this card

Pull AI Fundamentals when it is relevant and set it aside when it is not. Pair it with the other AI Conversations cards, lay them out on a table, and use the questions above to get everyone on the same page. Capture what you discuss on sticky notes or in a shared doc.