Generative AI
Also called GenAI
AI that makes new text, images, audio or video from patterns it learned, rather than only sorting or labelling things.
Most older AI sorted things: spam or not spam, which photo shows a cat, which film you might like next. Generative AI makes things. Ask for a cover letter, a picture of a fox in a raincoat or a voice reading your notes, and it produces something new each time.
It does this by learning the patterns in a vast amount of examples during training, then producing output that fits those patterns. That's why it's good at anything with a recognisable shape, like an email, a summary or a recipe. It's also why it can produce something that looks right without being right: a fluent paragraph and a true paragraph come out of the same machine.
For example
Asking a chatbot to turn 3 bullet points into a polite email to your landlord is generative AI at work. Your inbox's spam filter is the older, sorting kind.
Put it to use
Where you'll meet generative AI in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, how to use it there, and the mix-up most people make.
Daily Bytes Plus is in the Android app.