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Generative AI and AI are both powerful emerging technologies that are reshaping business. They are very closely related, yet have significant differences:
- Generative AI is a specific form of AI that is designed to generate content. This content could be text, images, video and music. It uses AI algorithms to analyze patterns in datasets to mimic style or structure to replicate different types of content. It is used to create deepfake videos and voice messages.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology that has the ability perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. AI is often used to build systems that have the cognitive capacity to mine data, and so continuously boost performance – to learn – from repeated events.
Let’s more deeply examine generative AI and AI, lay out their respective use cases, and compare these two rapidly growing emerging technologies.
Generative AI vs. AI
Both generative AI and artificial intelligence use machine learning algorithms to obtain their results. However, they have different goals and purposes.
Generative AI is intended to create new content, while AI goes much broader and deeper – in essence to wherever the algorithm coder wants to take it. These possible AI deployments might be better decision making, removing the tedium from repetitive tasks, or spotting anomalies and issuing alerts for cybersecurity.
In contrast, generative AI finds a home in creative fields like art, music and product design, though it is also gaining major role in business. AI itself has found a very solid home in business, particularly in improving business processes and boosting data analytics performance.
To summarize the differences between generative AI and AI, briefly:
- Creativity Generative AI is creative and produces things that have never existed before. Traditional AI is more about analysis, decision making and being able to get more done in less time.
- Predicting the future: Generative AI spots patterns and combines them into unique new forms. AI has a predictive element whereby it utilizes historical and current data to spot patterns and extrapolate potential futures in very powerful ways.
- Broad vs. Narrow: Generative AI uses complex algorithms and deep learning and large language models to generate new content based on the data it is trained on. It is a specific and narrow application of AI to very creative use cases. Traditional AI can accomplish far more based on how the algorithms are designed to analyze data, make predictions and automate actions – AI is the foundation of automation.
Also see: Top Generative AI Apps and Tools
Now, let’s go deeper into generative AI and artificial intelligence:
Understanding Generative AI
Generative AI is AI technology geared for creating content. Generative AI combines algorithms, large language models and neural network techniques to generate content that is based on the patterns it observes in other content.
Although the output of a generative AI system is classified – loosely – as original material, in reality it uses machine learning and other AI techniques to create content based on the earlier creativity of others. It taps into massive repositories of content and uses that information to mimic human creativity; most generative AI systems have digested large portions of the Internet.
Machine learning algorithms
Generative AI systems use advanced machine learning techniques as part of the creative process. These techniques acquire and then process, again and again, reshaping earlier content into a malleable data source that can create “new” content based on user prompts.
Using earlier creativity
As noted above, the content provided by generative AI is inspired by earlier human-generated content. This ranges from articles to scholarly documents to artistic images to popular music. The music of pop singer Drake and the band The Weekend was famously used by a generative AI program to create a “new” song that received considerable positive attention from listeners (the song was soon removed from major platform in response to the musicians’ record label).
Vast datasets
Generative AI can accomplish tasks like analyze the entire database of an insurance company, or the entire record keeping system of a trucking company to produce an original set of data and/or business process that provides a major competitive boost.
Thus, generative AI goes far beyond traditional machine learning. By utilizing multiple forms of machine learning systems, models, algorithms and neural networks, generative AI provides a completely new form of human creativity.
Also see: Generative AI Companies: Top 12 Leaders
Generative AI Use Cases
Generative AI is being used to augment but not replace the work of writers, graphic designers, artists and musicians by producing fresh material. It is particularly useful in the business realm in areas like product descriptions, suggesting variations to existing designs or helping an artist explore different concepts.
Generate text
Generative AI can generate legible text on various topics. It can compose business letters, provide rough drafts of articles and compose annual reports. Some journalistic organizations have experimented with having generative AI programs create news articles. Indeed, many journalists feel the threat from generative AI.
Generate images
Generative AI can generate realistic or surreal images from text prompts, create new scenes and simulate a new painting. Note, however, that the fact that these images are originally based the images fed into the generative AI system is prompting lawsuits by creative artists. (And not only graphic artists, but writers and musicians as well.)
Generate video
It can compile video content from text automatically and put together short videos using existing images. The company Synthesia, for instance, allows users to create text prompts that will create “video avatars,” which are talking heads that appear to be human.
Generate music
It can compile new musical content by analyzing a music catalog and rendering a similar composition in that style. While this has caused copyright issues (as noted in the Drake and The Weekend example above), generative AI can also be used in collaboration with human musicians to produce fresh and arguably interesting new music.
Product design
Generative AI can be fed inputs from previous versions of a product and produce several possible changes that can be considered in a new version. Given that these iterations can be produced in a very short amount of time – with great variety – generative AI is fast becoming an indispensable tool for product design, at least in the early creative stages.
Personalization
Generative AI can personalize experiences for users such as product recommendations, tailored experiences and unique material that closely matches their preferences. The advantage is that generative AI benefits from the hyper-speed of AI – producing personalization for many consumers in mere minutes – but also the creativity it has displayed in art and music to generative fresh, individualized personalizations.
“Generative AI is an indispensable ally for individuals who are newly entering the workforce,” said Iterate.ai Co-Founder Brian Sathianathan. “It can serve as an invisible mentor, assisting with everything from crafting compelling resumes and mastering interview strategies to generating professional correspondence and formulating career plans. By providing personalized advice, learning opportunities, and productivity tools, it can help new professionals navigate their career paths more confidently.”
Also see: AI Detector Tools
Understanding AI
Artificial intelligence is a technology used to approximate – often to transcend – human intelligence and ingenuity through the use of software and systems. Computers using AI are programmed to carry out highly complex tasks and analyze vast amounts of data in a very short time. An AI system can sift through historical data to detect patterns, improve the decision-making process, eliminate manually intensive task and heighten business outcomes.
Also see: 100+ Top AI Companies 2023
Isolating patterns
AI can spot patterns among vast amounts of data. It does this using specialized GPU processors (Nvidia is a leader in the GPU market) that enable super fast computing speed. Some systems are “smart enough” to predict how those patterns might impact the future – this is called predictive analytics and is a particular strength of AI.
Better business decisions
AI can be used to provide management with possible opportunities for expansion as well as detecting potential threats that need to be addressed. It helps in ways such as product recommendations, more responsive customer service and tighter management of inventory levels. Some executives use AI as an “additional advisor,” meaning they incorporate recommendations from both their colleagues and AI systems, and weigh them accordingly.
Heightened data analytics
AI adds another dimension to data analytics. It offers greater accuracy and speed to the processes of using data analytics. Used correctly, AI increases the chance of success and achieving positive outcomes by basing data analytics decisions on a much wider volume of data – and ideally higher quality data – whether historical or in real time.
Through the rapid detection of data analytics patterns, business processes can be improved to bring about better business outcomes and thereby assist organizations in gaining competitive advantage.
AI Use Cases
AI has almost limitless use cases – and more seem to crop up every week. Some of the top AI use cases include automation, speed of analysis and execution, chat and enhanced security. Be aware the additional vertical use cases are launching in education, healthcare, finance and other industry sectors.
Automation
AI can automate complex, multi-step tasks to help people get more done in a shorter span of time. For instance, IT teams can use it to configure networks, provision devices, and monitor networks far more efficiently than humans. AI is the driver behind robotic process automation, which helps office workers automate many mundane tasks, freeing up humans for higher value tasks.
Speed
AI finishes tasks with extraordinary speed. It uses technologies like machine learning, neural networks and deep learning to find and manipulate data in a very short time frame. This helps organizations to detect and respond to trends and opportunities in as close to real time as possible. The amount of data AI can analyze lies far outside the range of rapid inspection by a person.
Chat
AI-based chat, and the chatbots it powers, appears to be the app that has finally taken AI into the mainstream. Systems such as ChatGPT and others are introducing chat into untold numbers of applications. Done well, these applications improve customer service, search and querying, to name a few. And the advantage of AI is that, over time, the system improves, meaning that the AI chatbot is capable of ever more human conversation.
Enhanced Security
AI harnesses machine learning algorithms to analyze, detect, and alert managers about anomalies within the network infrastructure. Some of these algorithms attempt to mimic human intuition in applications that support the prevention and mitigation of cyber threats. This can help to alleviate the work burden on understaffed or overworked cybersecurity teams. In some cases, AI systems can be programmed to automatically take remediation steps following a breach.
AI, therefore, is finding innumerable use cases across a wide range of industries. It provides managers with data and conclusions they can use to improve business outcomes. Moreover, AI technology in all of its forms is still in its infancy, so expect the application of AI to uses cases to both broaden and deepen.
Also see: Best Artificial Intelligence Software 2023
Bottom Line: Generative AI vs. AI
Algorithms can be regarded as some of the essential building blocks that make up artificial intelligence. AI uses various algorithms that act in tandem to find a signal among the noise of a mountain of data and find paths to solutions that humans would not be capable of. AI makes use of computer algorithms to impart autonomy to the data model and emulate human cognition and understanding.
Generative AI is a specific use case for AI that is used for sophisticated modeling with a creative goal. It takes existing patterns and combines them to be able to generate something that hasn’t ever existed before. Because of its creativity, generative AI is seen as the most disruptive form of AI.
“Mainline AI applications based around learning, training and rules are fairly common in support of autonomous operations (vehicles, drones, control systems) as well as diagnostics, fraud and security detection, among other uses,” said Greg Schulz, an analyst at StorageIO Group. “Generative AI has the ability to ingest large amounts of data from various sources that gets processed by large language models (LLMs) influenced by various parameters to create content (articles, blogs, recommendations, news, etc.) with a human-like tone and style.”