What is Generative AI?
Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence models that can generate new content or data that is similar to but not identical to the data on which they were trained.
Generative AI has a wide range of applications, including AI-generated content (like social media captions or poetry), images, podcasts, and even code. Unlike conditional AI models, which predict or classify input data within fixed categories, generative models can create novel outputs. Generative AI has significant implications for content creation, data augmentation, and even synthetic data generation for training other AI models.
Key technologies underpinning generative AI include Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), and transformer models like GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer).
How does generative AI differ from other types of AI?
The primary distinction between generative AI and other AI is it can create entirely new content like text, images, audio, and video, rather than just analyzing existing data. Traditional AI systems are designed to perform specific tasks like classification, prediction, or pattern recognition based on predefined rules and training data.
Here are more differences:
- Data-driven approach: Generative AI takes a data-driven approach, learning patterns and relationships from large datasets using techniques like deep neural networks. It does not rely on explicit rules programmed by humans. Instead, it generates new outputs by capturing the underlying distributions in the training data.
- Unsupervised learning: While traditional AI often employs supervised learning on labeled data, generative AI excels at unsupervised learning, finding patterns in unlabeled data without human guidance. This allows it to generate novel content resembling the training data.
- Generative vs discriminative models: Traditional AI typically uses discriminative models that learn to classify inputs into predefined categories. Generative AI uses generative models that learn the probability distribution of the data to generate new samples similar to the training data.
- Creativity and adaptability: Generative AI exhibits creativity by producing original content and can adapt to different data distributions, while traditional AI follows predefined rules and cannot generate truly novel outputs or adapt without retraining.