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GENERATIVE AI: What is Generative AI?

An image generated using prompts in Copiolot. It depicts a futuristic data center with rows of server racks emitting a blue glow. There are individuals in white lab coats seated at workstations with multiple monitors. In the center, there’s an intricate, glowing multicolored network structure that looks like a visual representation of data or artificial intelligence.Microsoft Copilot was used to create this image by using prompts such as "Generative AI" "Information network" and "No robots"

What is Generative AI and how does it work?

Generative AI is artificial intelligence that can create text, images, videos, audio and other content. It works by learning common patterns and structures from large datasets and is able to provide a natural language response to a user’s prompts. While Generative AI systems are able to mimic speech, these tools do not understand what they are saying and are simply predicting the words that are most likely to come next in a sentence.

(!) Generative AI tools are language generators, not knowledge generators. The responses they produce are based on what is most probable, and not necessarily what is correct. (!)

What are the limitations of Generative AI?

Generative AI:

  • Cannot think and does not understand what it is producing
  • Can produce falsehoods confidently
  • Cannot explain its decisions or reasonings in any meaningful way
  • May contain out of date material
  • Uses large datasets that have been scraped from the internet and will perpetuate the biases found in its source data.