Rocket stares at the empty space on the mission poster. "We have no comet picture for the middle."
"Sky Sorter has seen comet snapshots," he says. "Can it just draw us a new one?"
Raven shakes her head. "Sky Sorter only picks a label. Star, planet, comet or streak. It never makes anything new."
Nova hums and projects a soft grid of light onto the poster. "Sorting and making are two different jobs," she says.
"One chooses from a short list. The other builds something that did not exist before."
"So what kind of system would you need to make a new picture?"
Sky Sorter takes a snapshot and picks one label from a short list. That is a sorting job.
Generative AI does a different job. It makes new content that did not exist before.
NIST describes generative AI as models that imitate the structure of the data they learned from.
They make "synthetic" content, such as images, videos, audio and text.
| Statement | True or false? |
|---|---|
| Generative AI can make text, images, audio and video. | ? |
| Sky Sorter is a generative AI because it uses snapshots. | ? |
| Generative AI imitates patterns in the data it learned from. | ? |
| Synthetic content always comes from a person typing it. | ? |
Some AI systems can talk with people in natural language, the everyday words we speak and write.
The AI4K12 Five Big Ideas says advances in deep neural networks, such as large language models, are making this possible.
Nova talks in our story because she is a story character. Real AI is a tool that people build.
Strong start. Tomorrow you peek at the trick behind text that a machine writes: predicting the next word.