The Turing Lectures: What is generative AI?

Generative AI refers to a type of artificial intelligence that involves creating new and original data or content. Unlike traditional AI models that rely on large datasets and algorithms to classify or predict outcomes, generative AI models are designed to learn the underlying patterns and structure of the data and generate novel outputs that mimic human creativity.
ChatGPT is perhaps the most well-known example, but the field is far larger and more varied than text generation. Other applications of generative AI include image and video synthesis, speech generation, music composition, and virtual reality.
In this lecture, Professor Mirella Lapata will present an overview of this exciting-sometimes controversial-and rapidly evolving field.
Mirella Lapata is professor of natural language processing in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on getting computers to understand, reason with, and generate natural language. She is the first recipient (2009) of the British Computer Society and Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS/IRSG) Karen Sparck Jones award and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the ACL, and Academia Europaea.
This lecture is part of a series of events - How AI broke the internet - that explores the various angles of large-language models and generative AI in the public eye.
This series of Turing Lectures is organised in collaboration with The Royal Institution