AI glossary
What is generative AI?
Generative AI is AI that creates new content (text, images, audio, video or code) based on what it learned from huge numbers of examples.
Classic AI classifies or predicts: it tells you whether a photo has a cat or what something will be worth. Generative AI produces something that did not exist before: a paragraph, an illustration, a voice, a code function.
Text and code come from LLMs; images mostly from diffusion models, which start from noise and refine it step by step into a picture. Many current models are multimodal and combine several kinds of input and output.
What it generates is plausible, not necessarily true. That is why it needs checking, and why problems like hallucinations show up.