As others have stated, these days "AI" typically refers to "Artificial Neural Networks". As the name suggests, they are meant to mimic one of the trillions of neural networks found in the brains of animals/people.

Like a budding, miniature brain, you need to train/educate it by giving it a variety of situations (inputs) and seeing how it responds (outputs). Then, you reward or punish it (positive/negative reinforcement) based on its behavior. Naturally, there are different methods/algorithms on how to apply that reinforcement. (I once read a paper where the authors tried training an ANN using a genetic algorithm! (Which is a different kind of AI.))

You could almost think of it as showing a toddler flash cards of cats and dogs and giving them a candy for every right answer. But, what happens if the deck does not have any fox cards and then they see a fox, will they identify it as a dog or as a cat?

The documentary on Netflix, "Coded Bias", highlights the dangers of AI and the importance of having good training data. (eg. Having a deck of flash cards that includes foxes.) My only issue with the movie is that it does not discuss any positive uses of AI, which there are some.

If you want to experiment with AI first-hand, I found Microsoft's ML.Net surprisingly easy to use. It was as easy as give it a text doc and within minutes it will give you an AI to play with.