AI Glossary

As artificial intelligence continues to transform the vision care industry, providers are increasingly encountering AI-powered technologies from diagnostics to patient management systems. This glossary is designed to help you navigate AI’s evolving landscape as you decide whether to implement AI tools in your practice, communicate with vendors and partners, and review research publications and reports containing terms and concepts related to AI. 

• View Glossary
  • AI Agents — A system or program that is capable of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of a user or another system.
  • AI Scribes — A software tool that uses speech-to-text technology and AI to transcribe conversations. 
  • Algorithm — The set of rules a machine follows to achieve a particular goal.  
  • Augmented reality — An enhanced version of reality created by the use of technology to overlay digital information on an image of something being viewed through a device (such as a smartphone camera). 
  • Artificial Intelligence — The capability of computer systems or algorithms to imitate intelligent human behavior. 
  • Chatbot — A computer program designed to converse with human beings. 
  • ChatGPT — An AI chatbot developed by OpenAI that uses natural language processing to create humanlike conversational dialogue. It can respond to questions and compose various types of written content, including articles, social media posts, essays, code, and emails.  
  • Conversational AI — Technologies, such as chatbots or virtual agents, that users can talk to. They use large volumes of data, machine learning, and natural language processing to help imitate human interactions by recognizing speech and text inputs and translating their meanings across various languages. 
  • Data mining — The practice of searching through large amounts of computerized data to find useful patterns or trends. 
  • Deep learning — A form of machine learning in which the computer network rapidly teaches itself to understand a concept without human intervention by performing a large number of iterative calculations on an extremely large dataset. 
  • Generative AI — Artificial intelligence that is capable of generating new content (such as images or text) in response to a submitted prompt (such as a query) by learning from a large reference database of examples. 
  • GPT — An abbreviation for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” GPT is an AI model designed to generate human-like text based on input prompts.  
  • Hallucination — A plausible but false or misleading response generated by an artificial intelligence algorithm. 
  • Large language model — A language model that utilizes deep methods on an extremely large data set as a basis for predicting and constructing natural-sounding text. 
  • Machine learning — A computational method that is a subfield of artificial intelligence and enables a computer to learn to perform tasks by analyzing a large dataset without being explicitly programmed. 
  • Natural language processing — A subfield of AI that uses machine learning to help computers understand and communicate with human language. 
  • Neural network — A computer architecture in which a number of processors are interconnected in a manner suggestive of the connections between neurons in a human brain and which is able to learn by a process of trial and error. 
  • Oculomics — The study of the eye as a window into overall health using ophthalmic biomarkers to diagnose and predict systemic diseases.  
  • Open AI — A San Francisco-based AI research organization and the developer of ChatGPT. 
  • Parameters — The variables that an AI model learns during training. 
  • Prompts — The text, images, or audio a user provides to an AI model to elicit a specific response. 
  • Prompt Engineering — The process of designing and optimizing prompts to guide AI models towards generating the desired responses.  
  • Quantum computing— A computer that takes advantage of the quantum properties of qubits to perform certain types of calculation extremely quickly compared to conventional computers. 
  • Voice recognition — A deep learning technique used to identify, distinguish, and authenticate a person’s voice.