What is generative AI?

Systems that produce new content rather than sorting existing content into categories.

What is generative AI?

Generative AI produces new content — text, images, audio, video or code — rather than classifying or ranking existing data. It is the category that includes large language models, image generators and speech synthesis.

How it differs from traditional AI

Traditional machine learning answers closed questions: is this transaction fraudulent, will this customer churn, what is in this image. The output is a label or a number, and accuracy is measurable against a known answer.

Generative systems produce open-ended output with no single correct answer, which makes quality harder to measure and makes human review a structural requirement rather than a precaution.

Where it earns its cost

Work that is high volume and low variance — product descriptions, localisation, first drafts.
Work currently not done at all because it was never economic.
Summarising and restructuring material a person would otherwise read in full.
Not: anything where a factual error reaches a customer without review.