Generative AI
AI that creates new content, such as text, images, music, video or computer code, based on patterns it learned from existing examples.
Most earlier AI was built to sort or predict: is this email spam, will this customer cancel? Generative AI produces something new instead. You describe what you want and it writes, draws or composes a fresh result.
Asking a tool for a short poem for a friend's birthday, or for a picture of a cat in a raincoat, are everyday examples. The output is new in the sense that it did not exist before, but it is assembled from patterns the system picked up from the training data it learned from.
Generated content can look polished while containing errors or invented details. The same technology can make realistic fake images and voices, known as deepfakes. There are also open questions about copyright and about using people's work for training without asking them.
Related: Large language model (LLM), Deepfake, Multimodal, Training data