What Is Generative AI? A Plain-Language Explainer
A jargon-free introduction to what generative AI is, how it works, what it can create, and how it differs from traditional artificial intelligence.
Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content. Instead of simply analysing information or answering a fixed set of questions, generative AI can produce things such as text, images, music, videos, software code and designs. You may already have used generative AI without thinking much about the technology behind it. Tools that can write an email, generate an image from a sentence, summarize a document or help create computer code are all examples of generative AI in action. The simplest way to understand it is: You give the AI an instruction, called a prompt, and it creates a response based on patterns it has learned from large amounts of data.