Generative AI
AI that creates new things rather than only sorting or labelling existing ones. Ask it for a poem, a summary, an image, or a snippet of code and it produces something fresh that did not exist a moment ago. This kind of content-making AI is called generative AI, and it is what most people mean when they talk about AI today.
Not all AI creates. Some AI makes decisions or sorts things into groups: is this email spam or not, is this photo a cat or a dog. Generative AI is different because it produces new content. You give it a request and it writes, draws, or composes something in response.
The tools that have made AI famous, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, are all generative. When you ask one to draft an email or explain a tricky idea, it is generating text word by word, shaping a reply that fits your request. Image tools do the same with pictures, building an image from your description.
For you, the practical takeaway is that generative AI is a creative partner, not a search engine. A search engine finds pages that already exist. Generative AI makes something new each time, which is powerful but also means two people can ask the same question and get slightly different answers.
Most text-based generative AI is built on a large language model, and the way it produces content sits within the wider world of artificial intelligence. Tools that can handle images and sound as well as text are described as multimodal.