Short answer
Generative artificial intelligence is AI that creates new content — text, images, code, audio or video — from your instructions. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are examples of generative AI for text, and image generators for images.
How it differs from “traditional” AI
Earlier AI solutions mostly analysed: they recognised, classified and forecast. Generative AI creates: it writes an e-mail, prepares a draft contract, draws an image, writes program code.
Types of generative AI
- Text — large language models (LLMs): ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini.
- Images — image generators working from a text description.
- Code — programming assistants.
- Audio and video — voice synthesis, video generation.
- Multimodal AI — one model works with text, images and audio at the same time, for example “reading” a photo of an invoice.
How businesses use it
Most often for drafting texts, summaries, replies to customers and document processing. In company systems, generative AI is usually combined with company data and checks so that the result is accurate and follows your rules. See also what is RAG.