Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is artificial intelligence capable of generating text, images, or other media, using generative models. Generative AI models learn the patterns and structure of their input training data and then generate new data that has similar characteristics.
In the early 2020s, advances in transformer-based deep neural networks enabled a number of generative AI systems notable for accepting natural language prompts as input. These include large language model chatbots such as ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Bard, and LLaMA, and artificial intelligence art systems such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALL-E.
Generative AI has uses across a wide range of industries, including art, writing, software development, product design, healthcare, finance, gaming, marketing, and fashion.
Investment in generative AI surged during the early 2020s, with large companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Baidu as well as numerous smaller firms developing generative AI models. However, there are also concerns about the potential misuse of generative AI, including cybercrime or creating fake news or deepfakes which can be used to deceive or manipulate people.
History of artificial intelligence
The academic discipline of artificial intelligence was founded at a research workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956, and has experienced several waves of advancement and optimism in the decades since. Since its founding, researchers in the field have raised philosophical and ethical arguments about the nature of the human mind and the consequences of creating artificial beings with human-like intelligence; these issues have previously been explored by myth, fiction and philosophy since antiquity. These concepts of automated art date back at least to the automata of ancient Greek civilization, where inventors such as Daedalus and Hero of Alexandria were described as having designed machines capable of writing text, generating sounds, and playing music.
Since the founding of AI in the 1950s, artists and researchers have used generative artificial intelligence to create new works.