What is Generative AI? In a Simple Language

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is a term that you might have been hearing for some time. It is all around, and making a great impact on how we live, and how we work. Well, Artificial Intelligence is not so new term and has been around for a few decades, but there is a relatively new term coming out, which is Generative AI, and many people want to understand this interesting technology, because of its groundbreaking and jaw-dropping capabilities.

Since the AI tools like ChatGPT, Bard, Midjourney, etc. have come up in front of users, they have taken the world by storm, and a new term is rising, which is Generative AI. I can say that it is a whole new world, a world full of possibilities, and potential.

What is Generative AI? In a Simple Language

Through this article, we will try to introduce you to Generative AI, in a simple, easy-to-understand language. So, if you are someone who wants to really understand what is Generative AI, read this article till the end. Let’s get started now.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Before we even move to understanding what is Generative AI, I want to take some time, to explain what is Artificial Intelligence. If you are someone who is already familiar with this, you may skip this part and jump to the next section, but I am writing this for those people, who aren’t much familiar with the term Artificial Intelligence so that when they read ahead, they would be able to understand the context.

So, simply defined, Artificial Intelligence can be understood as a process of creating machines or systems, which can do tasks that require human intelligence. This is a wide field, but essentially for now, you can consider that in Artificial Intelligence, we are creating such machines, or systems, which can perform tasks, that typically require human intelligence, like driving cars, recommending things, playing chess, etc.

If you want to learn more about Artificial Intelligence, you can refer to this article, but we will keep on moving to cover what is Generative AI ahead now.

What is Generative AI?

AI has been there around us for decades, and it has been producing an impact on our lives already, so now, what is Generative AI? Well, I will try to explain this in two parts. One in short, and another, quite long, explaining my short answer.

In short, we can say that Generative AI is a type of AI, which can generate new content, like text, images, audio, video, code, or synthetic data. Well, this sounds very simple and straightforward, but let’s dive into the backstory of why does this matter a lot now? This means if AI has been around for many years, then why Generative AI tools are taking the world by storm, and gradually changing the way we work, and how we live?

Here’s the backstory (from a general perspective) –

We all know that AI has been there for many years and making our lives simple in many terms. but you should pay attention to one thing, AI has been widely used in curating content. simply put, the humans were generating the content, and the AI was being used to make sure that the content is being delivered to the relevant audience.

But now, along with that, AI can be used to create new content, like text, images, audio, video, etc. This is a big and important step because just imagine, writing a book, it took many days, even months, or years for some authors to write a book, and now, the AI can write an entire book in minutes, just need to provide it with the right prompts(or set of prompts), and it can start working on it.

How does Generative AI work?

Unless you live under a rock, you might have witnessed the performance and the power of Generative AI through different apps and services, like ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc. Well, the jaw-dropping performance of these tools and services might have made you question – “HOW?” I mean how can it do that? well, to understand this in a complete sense, it would take much time and learning, so we will try to cover this in brief, so that you can understand in brief, about how Generative AI works, and then as you want, you can always go into greater details.

I would like to mention Discriminative AI, vs Generative AI here, as a part of this discussion, so that we can have an idea. When we say discriminative AI, we mean that it is the type of AI, which classifies the data into different categories, based on conditional probability. For example, Discriminative AI can be used to classify images, text, or identify objects, etc. On the other hand, Generative AI is the type of AI, which tries to model how the data is distributed and can generate new data of the same type.

For example, ChatGPT is an example of Generative AI. There are many other tools and applications which are based on Generative AI and are incredibly great at their performance, in doing several tasks.

Briefly speaking, Generative AI models use something called neural networks, to identify the structures, and patterns in the existing data, and then can generate new and original content. If you aren’t familiar with what neural networks are, you would need to understand deep learning, but in short, the idea is that we are using neural networks, which are inspired by the human brain, to perform the training.

Deep learning and many other innovations are taking the game of Artificial Intelligence to a different height, with an incredible pace, and in such a situation, to keep up, you would need to understand and act according to the change.

Since this article is intended to give you a basic introduction to Generative AI, and so that a diverse range of people should easily understand what Generative AI is, I am not going into much deeper details for this article, but if you want to understand this concept in a deeper way, I encourage you to spend some time searching on the web.

Generative AI use cases

As we are seeing that Generative AI is being used in many different areas already, and let me tell you that this is going to be evolving, and advancing now, so we need to keep an eye on the advancement, so that we are not left behind anywhere. Let’s discuss some of the use cases of Generative AI, which would give you an idea about how and where is the Generative AI technology being put to use, and how it is solving problems, and making people use it more and more.

Just to mention, there are many different areas, where Generative AI is being used, or can be used, solving many problems, and optimizing the workflow, but here, we are mentioning a few areas, where Generative AI is being used –

• Image Generation –
  You might have seen that people are generating stunning and unbelievable images using AI.
• Content Generation
  Nowadays, people are using AI, to generate content ideas, and the content itself.
• Music Generation –
  You might have seen that AI is being used in Music generation as well.
• Code generation –
  Many individuals and organizations are using AI-powered code generation tools to speed up their workflow.

And more…

The above-mentioned are just a few areas, where Generative AI is being used extensively, and yet there are many other areas and industries, where Generative AI can hit at a disruptive level. You should explore more about the concept of Generative AI.

Conclusion

In this article, we tried to understand what is Generative AI, in a simple, easy-to-understand language. The thing is that Artificial Intelligence has been there around us, for decades, and is helping us in different terms, making our lives simpler.

We have been witnessing tremendous growth in the field of Artificial Intelligence. With AI, now such things are being made possible, which were not even true in our dreams, and people are trying to solve many problems using AI. So, you need to understand this change that happening gradually and act accordingly. You need to think in terms of AI, and in terms of how you can get ahead with Artificial Intelligence. We hope that through our article, you could understand what is Generative AI, and you can explore more about Artificial Intelligence.

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