Generative AI: definition

Generative AI is artificial intelligence that creates new content, such as text, images, audio, or video, rather than only classifying or predicting from existing data.

Older AI mostly sorted things: is this spam, will this customer churn. Generative AI makes things: it writes the email, draws the image, drafts the code. The large language models and image models behind today’s tools are all generative.

For a business the shift is that AI moved from analysing work to doing it. That is powerful and also where the judgement comes in: generated output still needs a human to check it is right, on-brand, and worth shipping.

Related terms

Large language model (LLM): A large language model is a neural network trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it write, summarise, classify, and answer questions across almost any topic.
Diffusion model: A diffusion model is the kind of AI that generates images, and increasingly video, by starting from noise and refining it step by step into a result that matches a prompt.
Multimodal AI: Multimodal AI is a model that can take in or produce more than one kind of data, such as text plus images, audio, or video, rather than text alone.