What is Generative AI?

1. What is Generative AI?

Google Workspace with Gemini uses generative AI to help you work more efficiently across the Google Workspace apps. But what is generative AI? First, let's define AI. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a set of technologies that enable computers to perform various advanced functions. Examples include the ability to see, understand, and translate spoken and written language, analyze data, and make recommendations. Generative AI is a subset of AI that refers to the use of AI to create new content, like text, images, audio, and videos. To use generative AI, you provide a prompt to the system, and it generates a response based on what you gave it. A prompt is a piece of information that is provided to a user or system to initiate or guide a process. It can be a question, statement, or set of instructions. The system takes your prompt and uses it to generate an output, such as text, images, audio, or video. The type of output that is generated depends on what your prompt requests and the capabilities of the system. As a rapidly expanding technology, generative AI has a wide range of potential applications. However, with any new technology, evolving capabilities and uses create the potential for risks and complexities. There are some well-known risks of generative AI that organizations need to think through. One example is hallucination. Hallucination is a generated response from an AI application that might seem coherent and confidently presented but that could be biased or not based on factuality. Hallucinations can be reduced but are currently very difficult to eliminate. Thus, companies might choose to build workflows that include human reviewers to mitigate risks. For example, for brand safety, a company might want to review generated ads before they go live. At Google, our AI principles describe our commitment to developing technology responsibly and work to establish specific application areas we will not pursue. We also have robust privacy commitments that outline how we protect user data and prioritize privacy for Google Workspace. Generative AI does not change our foundational privacy protections for giving users choice and control over their data. For more information on Google's AI principles and data privacy policies, go to the additional resources document included in this course. As this field progresses, we continue to evolve our tools to reduce any risks.

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