In 1956, one of the founding fathers of AI, John McCarthy, defined artificial intelligence as “machines that can perform tasks that are characteristic of human intelligence”. What is meant by human intelligence in the definition is a bit opaque.
We can take a crack at the definition and think of artificial intelligence as a “technique that uses machines to replicate the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind”. The artificial part means that it’s pure mimicry and imitation. The intelligence part means that it captures some human ability of problem-solving or decision-making.