Generative AI

Generative AI is the label for systems that make something new. Ask for a paragraph, a picture, a melody or a function, and you get one back. That is different from the AI that quietly ran things for years beforehand, which mostly classified: is this email spam, is this transaction fraud, which film should we recommend next. Those systems pick from options that already exist. Generative systems produce output that did not exist a second ago.

The term is broad enough to be slightly unhelpful in technical conversation, but it has become the standard phrase in policy and workplace rules, which is where you will most often meet it. When a company, a university or an open-source project writes a “generative AI policy,” it usually means one thing in practice: what are you allowed to hand in that a model wrote for you, and who is responsible for it.