mGenerative AI, or generative adversarial networks (GANs), is a branch of artificial intelligence that focuses on creating and generating new content, such as images, text, music, and even video, closely resembling human-created content. 

Unlike other AI approaches that primarily focus on recognizing patterns or making predictions, generative AI aims to understand a given dataset's underlying patterns and structures and use that knowledge to generate new and unique instances that mimic the original data.

In this article, we will explore real-world generative AI examples, applications and potential future developments.

TL;DR: Generative AI examples

• Generative AI focuses on creating new content that resembles human-created content.
• It can generate images, text, music, and videos.
• Examples of generative AI include content automation, style transfer, simulations, music composition, and image super-resolution.
• Popular generative AI tools include Scribe, TensorFlow, PyTorch, OpenAI GPT-3, and NVlabs StyleGAN.
• Generative AI has applications in arts and design, music composition, image synthesis, language generation, finance, and marketing.

What is generative AI?

Generative AI refers to a branch of Artificial Intelligence that focuses on creating models and algorithms capable of generating new and original data that resembles human-created content.

Unlike traditional AI systems that primarily focus on analyzing and making decisions based on existing data, generative AI creates entirely new data points, such as images, music, text, and more.

Examples of generative AI in action

Generative AI has many uses, including:

Content automation: Language models like ChatGPT have demonstrated impressive capabilities to provide excellent customer service and even automate content.

Style transfer: Generative AI models, particularly those based on GANs, can transfer the style of one image onto another. For instance, someone can take a photograph and apply the artistic style of a famous painter, creating a new image that combines the original photograph's content with the painter's artistic flair.

Simulations and virtual environments: Generative AI is used to create realistic simulations and virtual environments for training autonomous systems, conducting research, and testing scenarios that might be challenging or dangerous to replicate in the real world.

Music composition: AI-powered generative models can compose original music in various styles and genres. These models can analyze existing musical pieces and generate new melodies, harmonies, and rhythms, creating music that sounds remarkably similar to human-composed pieces.

Image super-resolution: Thanks to generative AI, we can achieve super enhancement of the resolution of low-resolution images, producing higher-quality versions with finer details. This has applications in enhancing image quality for various industries, including medical imaging and surveillance.

Art and design: Generative AI has been used by artists and designers to create unique and original artworks, patterns, and designs. By inputting certain parameters or using randomization, artists can explore a wide range of creative possibilities.

Face generation: Generative AI models like StyleGAN can synthesize highly realistic human faces, even of people who do not exist. It’s important to note that this has raised concerns about the potential for creating fake images and deepfakes, highlighting the need for responsible use.

Data augmentation: Generative AI can augment datasets by creating additional data points that complement the existing training data. This is especially useful in scenarios where obtaining labeled data is costly or challenging.

Virtual avatars and characters: Generative AI has been used to create virtual avatars and characters for video games and virtual reality applications. These AI-generated characters can exhibit unique personalities and behaviors, enhancing immersive gaming experiences.

Generative AI is pushing the boundaries of what is possible in terms of creativity and innovation.

Popular examples of generative AI

Generative AI has gained significant attention in recent years, with several notable examples showcasing its capabilities.

• ChatGPT is a language model that generates human-like text responses in conversational settings.
• Google Bard is an AI chatbot that answers questions and prompts in a human-like way, generates text, translates languages, and writes creative content.
• DALL-E is a generative model that creates unique images from textual descriptions.
• Midjourney uses generative AI to create personalized travel itineraries.
• DeepMind has significantly contributed to generative AI with projects like AlphaGo and AlphaFold.

Top generative AI tools

Creatives and developers can leverage a range of tools and resources to explore and utilize generative AI. Here are ten generative AI tools and resources to check out:

1. Scribe

‎Scribe's AI-powered process automation tool uses GPT-4 AI to help businesses onboard new hires, answer customer questions, create SOPs, document processes, build training docs, and more. 

With Scribe Pages, you can combine multiple Scribes and ask the generative AI to write documents for you with a few simple prompts.

Add videos, images, GIFs and more to create comprehensive documents in minutes with AI.

Not convinced? Here’s a video from Scribe user Jack Herrington on how to make developer documentation easy with Scribe! 

‎With Scribe, you can:

• Automatically create your step-by-step guide, complete with text and screenshots.
• Fill gaps in any formal training programs.
• Turn any process into a step-by-step guide, reducing the time it takes to create a process doc, how-to guide or SOP, improving process consistency across your organization and automatically redacting sensitive information.
• Cut training time in half by quickly answering “How do I…?” for your customers—ultimately boosting customer onboarding and adoption & replacing or supporting live training with on-demand training content.
• Improve the onboarding experience by creating onboarding materials in seconds. This helps your business to cut ramp time in half and save yourself a boatload of time.

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2. TensorFlow

‎TensorFlow is an open-source deep learning library that provides a wide range of tools and resources for building and training generative AI models. It offers various APIs and frameworks like TensorFlow.js, TensorFlow Lite, and TensorFlow Extended (TFX), enabling developers to deploy generative models across different platforms.

2. PyTorch

‎PyTorch is another popular deep-learning framework that offers a rich ecosystem for generative AI. It provides high-level APIs and modules for developing and training generative models, including popular architectures like GANs and VAEs.

PyTorch also offers tools like TorchVision and TorchText for computer vision and natural language processing tasks.

3. OpenAI GPT-3

‎OpenAI's ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) is a powerful language model that can be fine-tuned for various generative tasks. It has been used for text generation, creative writing, and even chatbot applications.

OpenAI offers an API that allows developers to access and utilize the capabilities of GPT-3 in their own applications.

4. Keras

‎Keras is a user-friendly deep learning library that runs on top of TensorFlow and allows developers to quickly prototype and build generative models. It offers a simple and intuitive API for creating and training various generative models, making it suitable for beginners and experienced developers alike.

5. NVlabs StyleGAN

‎NVlab's StyleGAN is a widely used architecture for generating high-quality images. It has been instrumental in the field of generative AI and has resulted in impressive visual synthesis. The official implementation, along with pre-trained models, is available on GitHub; hence, enabling developers to experiment with and generate realistic images.

6. Hugging Face Transformers

‎Hugging Face Transformers is a library that provides a collection of pre-trained models and tools for natural language processing, including generative tasks. It offers various architectures like GPT, BERT, and T5, allowing developers to generate text, translate languages, answer questions, and more.

7. Google Colab

‎Google Colab is a cloud-based platform that provides free access to GPU resources and Jupyter Notebook environment. It's a convenient tool for prototyping and experimenting with generative AI models, as it allows users to write and run code collaboratively, leveraging the power of GPUs for faster training and inference.

8. RunwayML

‎RunwayML is a platform that provides an intuitive interface for training and deploying generative AI models. It offers a range of pre-built models and tools, including GANs, VAEs, and style transfer models.

RunwayML simplifies the development process and allows creatives to experiment with generative AI without extensive coding knowledge.

9. Papers with Code

‎Papers with Code is a website that curates papers from the machine learning field and provides code implementations. It can be a valuable resource for developers and researchers exploring the latest advancements in generative AI and accessing the corresponding code repositories.

10. Generative AI communities and forums

‎Engaging with generative AI communities and forums like Reddit's r/MachineLearning and r/generativeAI, the OpenAI Community, and the TensorFlow and PyTorch forums can provide valuable insights, resources, and opportunities for collaboration and knowledge sharing with like-minded individuals.

Not only do these tools and resources offer developers and creatives a starting point to delve into generative AI, experiment with different models and architectures, and leverage the power of generative AI in their projects — but they also help you to explore and stay updated with the latest advancements and contributions from the generative AI community.

Why is generative AI popular?

Generative AI has become popular due to its ability to produce content. Here are some key reasons why:

• Creative potential: Generative AI models can create artwork, music, and even realistic images, pushing the boundaries of human creativity.
• Data augmentation: Generative AI is useful for augmenting datasets and generating additional training data, especially in scenarios with limited labeled examples.
• Simulation and gaming: Generative models create realistic simulations and generate virtual environments for gaming and training autonomous systems.
• Personalization: Generative AI can create personalized content, such as product recommendations, customer training and support materials, user advertisements, and user interfaces.

Generative AI applications

Generative AI is helping companies automate tasks, enhance productivity and generate high-quality content. AI applications are found across diverse fields, including: 

• Arts and design: Artists use generative AI to create unique artworks, designs, and visual installations.
• Music composition: Musicians leverage generative models to compose music and create new melodies.
• Image synthesis: Generative AI is employed in computer vision tasks, such as super-resolution, style transfer, and creating realistic images of non-existent objects.
• Image and video creation: Generative AI can create images and videos based on specified settings, subjects, styles, or locations.
• Language generation: Language models like GPT-3 can generate coherent and relevant text for content creation and virtual assistants.
• Finance and business automation: Generative AI can optimize business operations through demand forecasting, supply chain management, sales forecasting, and pipeline optimization.
• Marketing content generation. AI can generate personalized customer content based on their preferences, past behavior, and demographics. AI can also generate content for marketing purposes, such as emails, social media posts, blog articles, video ads, and other advertising copy.

Future applications for generative AI tech

Generative AI has already made significant advancements, but the future of AI developments and applications is numerous. Below are some of the potential areas of growth and future applications for generative AI technology:

1. Content generation and augmentation: Generative AI can further evolve to create even more realistic and diverse content. So, we can expect to see advancements in generating high-resolution images, realistic videos, and immersive virtual environments. Additionally, generative models can continue to augment existing datasets, producing synthetic data to enhance training and improve performance across various domains.

2. Creative collaboration: Generative AI can facilitate collaborative creativity by enabling humans and AI systems to work together in artistic endeavors. Creatives and businesses can use generative models as creative tools, exploring new possibilities and leveraging AI-generated content as inspiration for their work.

3. Personalized experiences: Generative AI has the potential to create highly personalized experiences in areas like marketing, entertainment and user interfaces. It should be able to generate customized content tailored to individual preferences — delivering personalized recommendations, advertisements, and user interfaces that adapt and evolve based on user feedback and behavior.

4. Storytelling: Advancements in generative AI can lead to more sophisticated narrative generation, enabling AI systems to create compelling stories, interactive narratives, and video game scenarios in real time. This could revolutionize the entertainment and marketing industries and interactive experiences, offering dynamic and personalized storytelling experiences.

5. Product and display design: In retail, generative AI can turn sketches into color images and generate fashion models for product and display design. Generative AI technology could have a number of future applications in the retail industry, including AI-generated product images, AI-generated mockups, AI-generated product descriptions, and AI-powered customer service chatbots.

6. Manufacturing: Generative AI algorithms have the potential to transform predictive maintenance, quality control and production planning in the manufacturing industry.

FAQs

What is the difference between generative AI and discriminative AI?

• Generative AI is used for image synthesis, text generation, and content creation. Generative models like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) produce new, original content by learning from a dataset.
• Discriminative AI emphasizes learning the decision-making process and mapping the input features directly to the desired output or class label. It's commonly used in image classification, sentiment analysis, and object recognition.

How does machine learning enable generative AI?

Generative AI heavily relies on machine learning techniques. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are two of the most prominent ones.

• Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs): GANs consist of two neural networks—a generator and a discriminator—which compete against each other. The generator creates synthetic data to try and fool the discriminator, while the discriminator aims to distinguish between real and generated data. This competitive process leads the generator to continuously improve its output until it can generate data indistinguishable from real data.
• Variational Autoencoders (VAEs): VAEs are generative models that learn a compact representation of input data, known as the latent space. This latent space allows the model to generate new data by sampling from it. VAEs have been particularly useful in applications like image generation and language modeling.

How does generative AI use training data?

Training data is the foundation for the development and success of generative AI.

1. Capturing of contextual information: Training data helps generative AI understand and generate meaningful, contextual information. For example, training data containing sentence structures, grammar and semantic relationships in natural language generation helps the model generate grammatically correct text.

2. Learning patterns and structures: Generative AI models learn underlying patterns from training data to generate new instances similar to the original data.

3. Avoiding/reducing bias: Training data helps generate unbiased outputs from generative AI models.

4. Adapting to user preferences: Generative AI can generate personalized recommendations based on user preferences and behavioral data, such as in recommender systems.

5. Controlling output quality: Well-labeled training data leads to more accurate generative models.

Wrapping up: Generative AI examples

Generative AI examples encompass a wide range of applications, including content automation, style transfer, simulations, music composition, and image super-resolution. Generative AI is transforming the way we work and create—and so is Scribe! Sign up for a free plan today.