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Definition: generative AI


(1) For product commercials, see synthetic media.

(2) AI software that generates original media from scratch or from uploaded content. Generative AI became wildly popular in the early 2020s, and many chatbots and dedicated image generators do the job; for example, see ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E.

Input to a generative AI application can be text, images, audio or video, and the output can be the same. Text-to-image, text-to-video, text-to-audio, image-to-image, image-to-text and speech-to-text are other variations.

Trillions of words and images are copied from websites and other digital sources (mostly without permission) to train the models that provide the content for the results (see Nightshade). Contrast with predictive AI. See AI prompt, AI image generator, AI video generator, AI text generator and generative art.







In the Ocean or on a Horse
AI chatbots can do everything from writing an essay to transposing photos like these ChatGPT examples. The ocean looks real but the desert does look a bit fake. Too many details in the request to change the image can make the results more obvious that they are not real.








Everyone's Gotten Into It
Even Microsoft's Paint program, a staple for decades, added generative art in 2023. Offering eight artistic styles, these images of a "happy computer" were created using Pixel Art (top) and Oil Painting (bottom).





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