What is Generative AI?

Generative artificial intelligence has the power to change the way we live and work in substantial and unanticipated ways

Generative AI (Gen AI) is artificial intelligence that can create new content, whether text, images, music, or computer code. Unlike discriminative AI, which identifies and categorizes existing data (like labeling a photo as a "person" or "dog"), gen AI produces something new based on the data it's trained on.

Gen AI has a range of applications: from creating art and music to generating realistic video game environments, assisting knowledge workers in the production of content and the automation of related tasks, and even helping scientists in fields like biology or climate science by generating models or simulations based on existing data.

How the notion of AI technology-run-wild, ran wild

19th-century English author and thinker, Samuel Bulter, best known for his satirical novels, in 1863, published an essay titled Darwin Among the Machines, in the Christchurch, New Zealand newspaper The Press.

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The essay is notable for its early speculation of machine life evolving in a manner similar to biological life, a concept that we might associate with artificial intelligence or machine learning.

Butler wondered, might humans not evolve in much the same way Darwin's study of natural selection had just established the rest of the plant and animal kingdoms do, to the point that we would become dependent on our devices?

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