The basicsAI glossary
Generative AI
The family of AI that creates new content (text, images, sound, video or code) from a prompt. ChatGPT, Midjourney and Suno are examples. It produces what is most probable according to what it has learned, without checking that it is true.
In other words
A standard AI sorts your photos; a generative AI invents new ones.
Alyriaz articles that mention it
- Can AI have style?
Without artists to guide it, AI produces images that all look the same, say filmmakers. So what is a style?
- Awarded then disqualified: the AI-retouched video
Nikon has withdrawn the first prize from its microscope video competition, after it was retouched with AI. Where is the line between enhancing and inventing?
- AI, machine learning, deep learning: what contains what?
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, generative AI: these terms refer to nested sets, not synonyms. Let's clarify once and for all, with concrete examples.
- From today, all AI-generated images must carry an invisible signature in California.
On 2 August 2026, California's SB 942 law comes into force: generative AI providers with over one million monthly users in the state must embed a provenance marker in every image, video and audio they produce, and offer a free public detection tool. We explain what this changes in practice.
- How does an AI create an image? The answer is stranger than you think.
AI image generators don't draw in the way we understand it. They start from a chaos of random pixels and progressively denoise it until an image emerges. We explain how diffusion models work, without jargon, and what this process implies about the nature of these creations.
- What if AI ends up poisoning itself?
Model collapse describes what happens when an AI trains on content generated by other AIs: a gradual impoverishment, like a photocopy of a photocopy. A recent study revives the concern. We explore the phenomenon and the philosophical question it raises: can an intelligence that feeds only on itself still learn?