Build and transform technology landscapes to support evolving business strategies and operationalize innovation.
Learn moreMaximize market potential through a partner program offering LeanIX solutions tailored to your business model.
Learn moreTake your capabilities to the next level and arm yourself with the knowledge you need
See all resourcesGenerative AI creates original content, including text, images, and audio. Explore the game-changing potential and important challenges this technology brings.
Generative AI (GenAI) is a subset of artificial intelligence focused on creating original content based on patterns learned from existing data. This includes text, images, music, or even entire virtual environments.
Unlike traditional AI, which is used primarily for tasks like classification, prediction, and decision-making, GenAI specifically involves generating new content that mimics the style or structure of the data it was trained on. This opens new avenues for creativity and design, streamlines content production, and enhances customer experiences.
GenAI's ability to generate realistic and high-quality outputs, simulate complex scenarios, and enhance personalized experiences makes it a transformative tool in many industries, including technology, entertainment, healthcare, and education.
GenAI can:
📚 Related: AI Strategy
Within the long history of AI, the foundations of generative AI were laid with advancements in neural networks and deep learning techniques in the early 2010s.
These technologies enabled machines to learn automatically and parse data, leading to the development of systems that could generate realistic content.
Recent years have seen the integration of generative AI into various applications, from content creation tools like DALL-E to advanced chatbots like ChatGPT. These advancements are transforming industries by enabling more sophisticated and efficient workflows.
Guide
Enterprise Architecture done right accelerates your AI time-to-value
GenAI processes massive amounts of input data to generate new, original content. This process typically involves deep learning models trained on vast datasets to learn underlying patterns and structures.
These models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), use neural networks to learn the underlying patterns of a dataset.
Inspired by the human brain, neural networks are a series of interconnected algorithms that recognize patterns in data. They consist of layers of interconnected nodes (neurons) that process input data, with each layer extracting increasingly complex features.
During training, the network makes guesses and checks them against correct answers, adjusting itself to improve predictions. Over time, with lots of data and many repetitions, the neural network learns to generate more accurate and authentic content by refining these connections.
GANs consist of two neural networks—the generator and the discriminator—engaged in a continuous feedback loop. The generator creates new content (e.g., images), while the discriminator evaluates the authenticity of the generated content compared to real data.
Over time and through continuous feedback, the generator improves its capability to produce realistic content that can fool the discriminator.
For example, GANs are used in creating realistic images for fashion. The generator produces images of clothing and the discriminator checks for authenticity.
VAEs are used to generate new data by learning a pattern from the input data. They work by compressing the input data into a simpler form and then reconstructing it back to its original form.
This technique helps generate new, similar data, like creating new faces or images, adding variety and creativity within a set structure.
Transformers, such as OpenAI's GPT-3, use self-attention mechanisms to process and generate text with high accuracy and contextual relevance. Self-attention mechanisms work by allowing the model to weigh the importance of each word in a sentence relative to all other words, rather than processing each word independently or in a fixed order.
This enables the model to capture context more effectively, understand relationships between words regardless of their position, and generate more coherent and contextually accurate text.
For example, GPT-3 can generate articles, write code, or even create poetry.
The model training process with generative AI involves several key steps and vast computational resources to enable the creation of original content.
1. Data Collection
Large datasets are collected based on the type of content the model aims to generate. For instance, training a text generation model like GPT-3 requires a massive corpus of text data from books, articles, transcripts, and websites.
2. Data Preprocessing
The collected data is cleaned and preprocessed to remove noise and irrelevant information, ensuring the model learns from only high-quality data.
3. Model Initialization
The model's architecture is defined, and initial weights are set. Weights are numerical values that determine the importance of input features in making predictions or decisions. Initialization also involves selecting the number of layers, nodes, and other hyperparameters that will determine the model's structure and capacity.
4. Model Training Process
The model training process with generative AI involves feeding a large dataset into the model, adjusting its internal parameters through iterative optimization, and refining its ability to produce new, realistic data that mimics the input data.
📚 Related: Secure AI in Enterprise Architecture
Evaluating generative AI models involves assessing their performance and reliability through various metrics and qualitative analyses. Here are the key metrics:
Healthcare organizations are using GenAI to accelerate drug discovery, create synthetic medical data, improve medical image analysis, and personalize care for individual patients.
Financial services companies are using GenAI to automate complex tasks such as fraud detection, financial forecasting, and report generation, enhancing decision-making and reducing operational costs.
GenAI is changing creative processes in the entertainment industry. Content creators can now leverage GenAI models to create original written content, lifelike virtual characters, immersive game environments, and original music and soundtracks.
Manufacturers are using GenAI in multiple areas. GenAI models can generate innovative prototypes to improve product design, predict equipment failures for predictive maintenance, and enhance quality control through real-time defect detection. GenAI can also streamline supply chain management by predicting demand and optimizing inventory and production schedules.
GenAI is transforming the legal industry by automating document drafting, legal research and review, and contract analysis. It reduces the manual workload for legal professionals by generating and reviewing contracts, analyzing text, and conducting comprehensive legal research.
Generative AI enhances IT operations by automating coding, testing, and cybersecurity. It provides real-time assistance to developers, optimizes software testing processes, and enhances cybersecurity measures, leading to more efficient and secure IT operations.
Generative AI significantly enhances enterprise architecture by streamlining and optimizing IT landscapes. It can assist enterprise architects in modeling, planning, and managing complex IT environments, ensuring that systems are efficient, scalable, and aligned with business goals. Key applications include:
📚 Related: Is your IT Landscape ready for Generative AI Innovation?
Webinar
📚 Related: Is Generative AI The Solution For Sustainable IT?
Advancements in AI technologies, such as more sophisticated GANs and LLMs, will continue to push the capabilities of GenAI. As research continues to refine algorithms like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Large Language Models (LLMs), we can expect generative AI systems to produce increasingly realistic and complex outputs.
These models will likely excel in generating high-resolution images, coherent and contextually nuanced text, and even lifelike video and audio content. This heightened realism will not only enhance existing applications but also enable new forms of creative expression and digital content creation.
Another significant trend is the integration of GenAI with quantum computing. Quantum computing's ability to process and analyze data at unprecedented speeds holds the potential to revolutionize how generative models are trained and deployed. The synergy between quantum computing and GenAI could also open entirely new areas of research and application, pushing the boundaries of what is possible with current technology.
📚 Related: Shadow AI
GenAI will transform industries by automating and enhancing creative processes, optimizing workflows, and generating innovative, data-driven solutions to problems.
As this technology continues to evolve, we can expect it to produce increasingly realistic and complex outputs, further blurring the lines between human and machine-generated content.
However, with the help of AI governance, it is crucial to address the ethical, technical, and societal challenges associated with GenAI to ensure its responsible and beneficial use.
80% of companies are leveraging generative AI
90% of IT experts say they need a clear view of AI use in their organizations
14% say they actually have the overview of AI that they need
What is meant by generative AI?
Generative AI refers to a subset of artificial intelligence that focuses on creating new content, such as text, images, music, or entire environments, based on patterns learned from existing data. It uses models like GANs, VAEs, and transformers to generate realistic and original outputs.
Is chatbot a generative AI?
Some chatbots use generative AI, particularly those designed to create dynamic and contextually relevant responses. Examples include advanced conversational agents like OpenAI's ChatGPT, which generate human-like text based on user inputs. However, not all chatbots are generative; many use rule-based or retrieval-based methods.
What is generative AI vs normal AI?
Generative AI focuses on creating new content, while "normal" AI (often referred to as discriminative AI) typically classifies, predicts, or identifies patterns within data. Generative AI models produce outputs like images or text, whereas discriminative models distinguish between different inputs or predict outcomes.
What's the opposite of generative AI?
The opposite of generative AI is discriminative AI. While generative AI creates new data samples, discriminative AI focuses on identifying and classifying existing data. Discriminative models are used for tasks like image recognition, spam detection, and predictive analytics.
Does Siri use generative AI?
Siri primarily uses retrieval-based AI and machine learning for natural language processing and understanding, rather than generative AI. It relies on predefined responses and structured queries to provide answers and perform tasks, rather than generating new and original content on the fly.
Report
2024 SAP LeanIX AI Report
Find out how 226 IT professionals working for organizations across the world deal with AI Governance
Access Now