# Generative AI

> Generative AI is the class of AI systems that produce new content (text, images, audio, video, code) rather than only classifying or scoring existing inputs.

Category: Foundational
Source: https://impetora.com/glossary/generative-ai
Part of: Impetora AI consulting glossary (https://impetora.com/glossary)

## What is Generative AI?

Generative AI relies on models that learn the distribution of their training data and then sample from it. Modern generative AI is dominated by transformer-based language models, diffusion models for images, and multi-modal models that combine modalities. Generative systems are productive and creative, but their outputs are not deterministic and are not guaranteed to be true. Enterprise deployments wrap generation with retrieval, validation, redaction, and citation layers to make outputs reviewable.

## How does Generative AI apply to enterprise AI?

Generative AI delivers value where draft quality and speed matter more than absolute correctness on first pass: customer support drafts, internal knowledge answers, document summaries, contract red-lines, sales email variants. High-risk decisions still need a human in the loop.

## Related terms

- [Large Language Model](https://impetora.com/glossary/large-language-model) - A Large Language Model (LLM) is a foundation model trained on text to predict the next token, capable of generating, summarising, and reasoning over natural language.
- [Discriminative AI](https://impetora.com/glossary/discriminative-ai) - Discriminative AI refers to models that classify or score existing inputs rather than generating new content, learning the boundary between classes from labelled data.
- [Hallucination](https://impetora.com/glossary/hallucination) - A hallucination is a confident-sounding output from a generative AI model that is not grounded in any source and is factually wrong.
- [Guardrails](https://impetora.com/glossary/guardrails) - Guardrails are runtime checks placed around an AI system to constrain inputs, outputs, and tool calls within safety, compliance, and business policy.

## External references

- [Stanford AI Index Report](https://aiindex.stanford.edu/)

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