What is Generative AI?
AI that creates new content — text, images, audio, video or code — instead of only sorting or analysing existing data.
Older AI mostly made predictions: is this email spam, which product will you buy next. Generative AI produces something new in response to a request: an essay, a portrait, a song, a short film, working code.
ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude generate text (and increasingly images); Midjourney and Flux generate images; Veo, Sora and Kling generate video. They all learn patterns from very large amounts of training data and use those patterns to create fresh output.
In daily life
Turning a selfie into a Ghibli-style illustration, drafting a cover letter, or making a 10-second reel from one sentence are all generative AI.
Related terms
The type of AI behind chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, trained on huge amounts of text to predict and generate language.
The main technology behind AI images and video: the model starts from random noise and gradually refines it into a picture that matches your prompt.
AI that understands and produces more than one kind of input — text, images, audio and video — in the same conversation.
