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Generative AI

Generative AI is artificial intelligence that creates new content, like text, images, code or audio, from patterns it learned in huge numbers of examples. ChatGPT and Claude are examples.

Select any words here to ask your Maestro about them.

Of these three tasks, which one does generative AI save you the most time on?

Estimated minutes per task for an office worker. Example data.

How it works: a model trained on huge numbers of examples (text, images, code) learns their patterns, and when you ask, it creates new content that follows them, piece by piece. LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT are generative AI for text, built on neural networks.

What it's good for: drafts, summaries, translations, formulas, code and brainstorming: work you can check. You ask with a prompt.

Where it breaks: it writes what sounds likely, not what it checked, so it can make up facts with full confidence. That's called an AI hallucination. To have it answer from your own documents, use RAG.

How it's used

Four requests, four kinds of output

What you can ask for

  1. Text: "Write three subject lines for our spring sale"
  2. Image: "A flat illustration of a shopping bag with flowers"
  3. Code: "Write a Python script that totals sales by store"
  4. marked: Data: "Make up 20 orders so I can test my dashboard"Made-up data is handy for testing, but it isn't real: never let it slip into a report.
It's the same move every time: you describe what you want, and the model creates something new that fits the patterns it learned.

When to look closer

What you paste into the chat

Cleaning up a customer list

  1. marked: You paste 300 customers with names, emails and phone numbers into a free chatbot

You paste your customer list into a free chatbot so it can clean it up. Where does that list go?

Ask your Maestro about Generative AI

It answers from the free course page closest to this word, the way it answers while you study.

Example

You: What does "Generative AI" mean, in plain words?

Your Maestro: I'll explain it with a case of yours: it sticks better than a definition. Which task in your week could you check faster than you do it?

Asking about: Answers from the page "What is Claude Code, and what can it do with data?"

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Related terms

  • LLM (large language model)

    An LLM is a program trained on huge amounts of text to continue a piece of text one chunk at a time: it works out which chunk is likeliest to come next and writes it. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all run on an LLM.

  • Prompt

    A prompt is what you write to an AI model to ask it for something: the question or instruction, plus everything you give it to work with, like data, examples or the format you want back.

  • AI hallucination

    A hallucination is an answer from an AI model that sounds confident and well written but is false or comes from no source at all: a number, a fact or a quote nobody ever said.

  • RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)

    RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) gets an AI to answer from your documents: it first searches them for the passages closest to the question and hands those to the model with the prompt.

The whole glossary