What is Generative AI and How Does it Work?

Poornima Rawat ( Content & Marketing )
June 6, 2024
Generative AI

Imagine a musician with endless melodies and rhythms at his fingertips who listens, learns, and then composes harmonious symphonies that resonate with the classics while adding a unique touch of his own freshly crafted composition. Generative AI, a cutting-edge technology, personifies this musician, transforming vast datasets into a freshly new composition, reshaping the landscape of music and sound into a more pleasing and harmonic melody, changing how we create and interact with digital content.

In this fast-moving digital world, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the world and has always been a topic of significant interest, evolving day by day with the rapid advancement and changing dynamics in technology. But a new trend is emerging that goes beyond processing information and creates entirely new things in a more engaging and expressive format. This is Generative AI, a technology revolutionizing various fields and opening frontiers of unexplored opportunities. But before diving more into the story, let’s explore what Generative AI actually is and how this technology works.

What is Generative AI ( Gen AI ) ?

Imagine an AI writing a poem inspired by the works of a legendary poet with a unique versus of a machine’s mind, composing a beautiful melody, or generating the portrait of a person who doesn't exist. This is the true essence of generative AI, creating entirely new and original content in just a matter of seconds.

Generative AI (Generative Artificial Intelligence)
is a type of Artificial Intelligence technology that creates various types of content like text, images, audios, music, videos, 3D models and synthetic data based on the input it receives. Depending upon the data provided, traditional AI models only analyze the data, classify it to predict the outcomes and do not create fresh content. But Generative AI simply doesn't copy the existing data, rather it learns to create something entirely new high quality content.

Its ability to craft unique content in various types originates from its deep learning models, particularly those designed to understand and mimic the structures and patterns found in the training data. This makes it unique and useful for creating synthetic data for training other AI models, crafting video games with dynamic content and animations or designing virtual assistants that generate human-like responses.



How Does Generative AI Work? 

At its core, Generative AI is a master of prediction that works on the principles of machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence that enables machines to learn from data, but Gen AI takes a step further by using Neural Networks (a machine learning program that uses interconnected nodes or neurons to process and learn from data and improve its accuracy over time) to identify the structures and patterns within existing dataset of human created content in order to create new or original content. Below is a breakdown how generative AI works: 

  • Data Collection: The initial step involves collecting a large amount of datasets relevant to the content that AI aims to generate. For example, it can be a dataset of images or text for generating realistic pictures or logical sentences.

  • Preprocessing: Data preprocessing is a crucial step that cleans, organizes and prepares the raw data for training a generative model. It is similar to cleaning and organizing your ingredients before you cook a delicious meal. Without this process generative models would not be able to learn effectively from the inconsistent data.

  • Model training: Using neural networks generative AI models are constructed. The model is trained on the collected dataset to learn the data’s pattern and structures. For example, GPT-4 ( text-generating model) learns syntax, language context and semantics by predicting most likely words in a sentence during training.

  • Content Generation: Once the model is trained, it can generate new content by sampling from the compressed knowledge the model has acquired, or through a generator network that can directly produce fresh content, depending on the model used.

  • Refinement: After generating a new content, the model undergoes further refinement or post-processing based on the feedback loops within the architecture to improve its quality to meet specific requirements. 

Use Cases for Generative AI:  

Generative AI can be applied in various use cases, its potential excels far beyond just creating text such as:

  • Content Creation: Generating texts, stories, social media content, articles or blog posts.

  • Customer Service or Technical Support: Instantly providing personalized responses to customers inquiries via chatbots.

  • Augmented & Virtual Reality: Creating immersive and intuitive AR & VR environments.

  • Personalized Training: Drafting personalized content or steps for training based on trainee’s skillset.

  • Image Generation: Producing unique and realistic images from text based descriptions.
  • Video Generation: Generating realistic videos for entertainment, education etc.

  • Code Generation: Writing codes on entire programs, based on natural language descriptions.
  • Data Augmentation: Producing new synthetic data samples based on the existing data to improve machine learning models.

  • Music Composition: Composing original music tracks, depending upon genres and styles of the users.

These are few use cases of Generative AI, but it not only limits here. According to McKinsey & Company research report, generative AI could add a total value of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion in economic benefits annually when applied across industries. This technology is paving its way for a wide variety of applications across all industries, helping organizations to automate their processes, improve customer interactions, enhance industrial operations, maintenance and lot more, driving growth and fruitful opportunities for the near future.