AI Vocabulary · 01 The Model
What is Generative AI?
AI that creates new content, such as text, images, audio, video or code, instead of only sorting or predicting.
Generative AI is the branch of AI that produces new content. Earlier AI systems mostly classified things: spam or not spam, cat or dog, fraud or fine. Generative systems write emails, draft code, create images, compose music and summarise documents.
The best-known examples are large language models for text and image generators for pictures. Many tools are now multimodal and mix both. Under the hood they are trained with machine learning on huge amounts of existing content and produce new output that follows the same patterns.
Why it matters for you
Generative AI is what changed everyday work since 2022. It is strongest at first drafts, variations and turning rough input into structured output. It is weakest where exact facts matter, because plausible output is not the same as true output, which is how hallucinations happen.
Own it
Generated content still needs an owner. Decide who checks it, how it is labelled, and which of your own material, such as examples, tone and knowledge, it is allowed to draw on.
Where it comes from
No single person coined the term. The mathematics behind early text generators goes back to Andrey Markov's chains of 1906, and in 2014 new deep learning techniques such as generative adversarial networks made realistic generated images possible. "Generative AI" went mainstream when ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022, after text-to-image tools like DALL-E. Generative AI (Wikipedia)
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