# Generative AI

> AI that creates new text, images, audio or code instead of just sorting things.

- Level: Basic
- Topics: AI
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/generative-ai/
- In Spanish: [IA generativa](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/generative-ai/)

**Generative AI** is the kind of AI that produces new content: a paragraph, an email, a picture, a song, a voice, a video, a piece of code. Older AI was mostly about deciding things, like whether a photo shows a dog or whether a payment looks like fraud. Generative AI goes the other way: you describe what you want, usually in plain words, and it makes something that did not exist before.

It works by learning the patterns of an enormous amount of existing material. A text model like the ones behind ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini has read so much writing that it can predict, word after word, what a plausible answer looks like. An image model has seen so many pictures with captions that it can turn 'a cat in a raincoat, watercolor' into a new image. What comes out is new, but built from patterns in what went in.

It became a mainstream topic in late 2022, when ChatGPT and image generators reached the general public. It is useful for drafting, summarizing, translating, brainstorming and coding. It also brings real problems: it can state false things with confidence, imitate real people's voices and faces, repeat the biases of its training data, and raise open questions about the copyright of the material it learned from.

## An analogy

Like a musician who has listened to thousands of songs and can improvise a new one in any style you ask for. The tune is new, but you can hear where the influences come from, and sometimes it hits a wrong note with total confidence.

## Keep in mind

- Creates new content from a description, called a prompt.
- Learns from huge amounts of existing text, images or sound.
- Output sounds or looks convincing even when it is wrong.
- Raises open questions about copyright, deepfakes and bias.

## Go deeper

- [Generative artificial intelligence on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence)
- [What is generative AI? (AWS)](https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/generative-ai/)

## Related terms

- [Artificial intelligence](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/artificial-intelligence/): Getting computers to do things that, until recently, only people could do.
- [ChatGPT](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/chatgpt/): OpenAI's chat assistant, the app that brought AI chatbots to the general public.
- [Claude](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/claude/): Anthropic's family of AI models, and the assistant app built on them.
- [Gemini](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/gemini/): Google's family of AI models, and the assistant app that carries the same name.
- [Training and inference](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/training-and-inference/): Training builds the model once; inference is using it, millions of times a day.
- [Prompt](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/prompt/): Everything you send to an AI model: the question, the instructions, the context.
- [Deepfake](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/deepfake/): A fake video, photo or voice made with AI to look and sound like a real person.