What Is Generative AI?
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What Is Generative AI?
Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence models that create new content — text, images, audio, code, video — rather than just analysing or classifying existing data. Tools like large language models and image generators learn the patterns in huge datasets and use that learning to produce original output in response to a prompt.
How Generative AI Differs From Traditional AI
Traditional AI is typically built to make a prediction or decision from data — flagging fraud, recommending a product, sorting an image into a category. Generative AI instead produces new material: a written draft, a piece of artwork, a block of code, a synthetic voice. The underlying models (like transformers, the architecture behind most modern language models) are trained to predict the most plausible next piece of content given everything that came before it.
How Businesses Use It
Businesses are using generative AI for drafting marketing copy and reports, summarising documents, writing and reviewing code, powering customer support chatbots, and generating first drafts of designs or presentations. The technology speeds up first-draft work considerably, but outputs still need human review — generative models can produce confident-sounding content that's factually wrong, so oversight remains part of any responsible deployment.