What is generative AI: text, images and video on request
What you can hand over to a tool that writes and draws, and what you should keep for yourself before paying for a subscription.
Type "description for an oak chair, warm tone, five lines" and a few seconds later you have the text. That is generative AI, seen up close.
The definition in one sentence: it is software that has learned from huge quantities of examples and produces new content on request, instead of merely classifying or searching for existing content.
How it differs from the AI you already knew
The spam filter in your email is artificial intelligence, but it generates nothing: it decides whether a message is spam or not.
Generative AI does the opposite. It does not choose between ready-made answers, it writes one. That is why it sometimes gets things wrong with great confidence: it invents a figure, a quotation, a product feature that does not exist. Remember this every time you read something it has written.
What it can really produce for your business
Text is the most mature area. Product descriptions, replies to recurring emails, newsletter drafts, summaries of long documents. Here the time saving is felt straight away.
Images work well for settings and supporting graphics: the background for a post, an illustration for the blog. For a photo of your real product, with the right colours and the exact details, a photographer is still more reliable.
Video is the newest part. You can generate short clips or animate an image, but quality varies a great deal and it takes patience to get something presentable. Do not count on it yet for a corporate video.
What you should not delegate
Prices, terms of sale, technical data, promises to customers. Anything that, if wrong, creates a legal or commercial problem should be written, or at least checked, by a person.
Do not upload confidential customer data to a free tool either, without having read how it handles the information. Many use it to improve themselves.
What to do now
Before buying any subscription, pick a boring task you do every week, for example answering the same customer questions. Try it with the free version of a tool for two weeks.
If the result saves you time even after the corrections, then it is worth paying. If you spend more time fixing than you would writing from scratch, drop it: you do not need it, at least for now.
If you want to work out which task in your business suits it best, at AIR this is exactly the kind of assessment we do, without selling you tools you will not use.
Frequently asked questions
Are generative AI and ChatGPT the same thing?
No. ChatGPT is one of the products built on generative AI. There are many other tools, some specialised in images, others in video or audio.
Can I use content generated with AI freely?
It depends on the tool's terms of use and on the content. Read the terms before using it for commercial purposes, and be careful with images that resemble real brands or people.
Does Google penalise text written with AI?
The problem is not the tool but the quality. Generic text full of errors performs badly, whoever wrote it. Text that has been reviewed, is accurate and is useful does not.
Do I need a technician to use it?
To get started, no: you just need to write clear requests in plain language. You need outside help when you want to connect it to your business software or your data.
Text created with the support of AI. Method and content are AIR's.