Generative AI is today’s buzziest form of artificial intelligence, and it’s what powers chatbots like ChatGPT, Ernie, LLaMA, Claude, and Command—as well as image generators like DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, Adobe Firefly, and Midjourney. Generative AI is the branch of AI that enables machines to learn patterns from vast datasets and then to autonomously produce new content based on those patterns. Although generative AI is fairly new, there are already many examples of models that can produce text, images, videos, and audio.
Many “foundation models” have been trained on enough data to be competent in a wide variety of tasks. For example, a large language model can generate essays, computer code, recipes, protein structures, jokes, medical diagnostic advice, and much more. It can also theoretically generate instructions for building a bomb or creating a bioweapon, though safeguards are supposed to prevent such types of misuse.