TL;DR:
Generative AI is like a super-creative artist that can whip up text, images, videos, and more, all based on patterns it learned from existing data. Think of it as a digital Picasso that can create new masterpieces from scratch, just by understanding the essence of what it’s seen before. This tech powers everything from chatbots like ChatGPT to image generators like DALL-E, making it a game-changer in fields like art, writing, and even software development. But, just like any powerful tool, it comes with its own set of challenges, like the potential for misuse in creating fake news or deepfakes.
Details for the Techies:
Generative artificial intelligence (generative AI, GenAI, or GAI) is a subset of artificial intelligence that uses generative models to produce text, images, videos, or other forms of data. These models learn the underlying patterns and structures of their training data and use them to produce new data based on the input, which often comes in the form of natural language prompts1. Improvements in transformer-based deep neural networks, particularly large language models (LLMs), enabled an AI boom of generative AI systems in the early 2020s. These include chatbots such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and LLaMA; text-to-image artificial intelligence image generation systems such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALL-E; and text-to-video AI generators such as Sora1. Companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, and Baidu, as well as numerous smaller firms, have developed generative AI models1. Generative AI has uses across a wide range of industries, including software development, healthcare, finance, entertainment, customer service, sales and marketing, art, writing, fashion, and product design1. However, concerns have been raised about the potential misuse of generative AI, such as cybercrime, the use of fake news or deepfakes to deceive or manipulate people, and the mass replacement of human jobs1. Intellectual property law concerns also exist around generative models that are trained on and emulate copyrighted works of art.
