Artificial Intelligence (AI): Generative AI

University of Southern California Libraries offer a brief explanation about generative AI:

Generative AI is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that creates (aka generates) content based on the data and examples it was trained on.  The most well-known generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, are powered by large language models (LLMs).  LLMs are trained on massive amounts of text in order to understand user input (prompt) and generate a response by predicting the most likely desired sequence of words and sentences.

The company SAS Analytics Solutions offers this simple definition:

Generative AI consumes existing data, learns from it, then generates data with similar characteristics.  For example, it can generate text, images, audio, video, and computer code.

Several generative AI tools are listed in the boxes below, organized by type.  Click on a link below, or point at the Generative AI tab above, for more information about each tool.