Supervised Learning
Definition
A training method where the AI learns from examples that have been labelled with the right answer. Show it thousands of photos tagged "cat" or "not a cat," and it learns to tell the difference. The labels are the supervision. It's a powerful approach, though it depends on someone first doing the work of labelling all that data correctly.
Why It Matters
It's one of the main ways AI gets built. Knowing it relies on labelled examples explains both why these systems work and where their blind spots come from.
What does that look like in practice?
Teaching an AI to flag spam by feeding it thousands of emails already marked 'spam' or 'not spam' is supervised learning.
What people actually mean when they say this
When someone says the AI was 'taught with examples,' they usually mean supervised learning, where each example came with the right answer attached.
Not to be confused with
Last reviewed: June 2026
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