# Generative AI ### About this export | Field | Value | | --- | --- | | **content_type** | lesson | | **platform** | contentstack-academy | | **source_url** | https://www.contentstack.com/academy/courses/ai-foundations/generative-ai | | **course_slug** | ai-foundations | | **lesson_slug** | generative-ai | | **markdown_file_url** | /academy/md/courses/ai-foundations/generative-ai.md | | **generated_at** | 2026-05-18T10:08:42.398Z | > Part of **[AI Foundations](https://www.contentstack.com/academy/courses/ai-foundations)** on Contentstack Academy. **Academy MD v3** — structured for retrieval; no quiz or assessment keys. #### Video details #### At a glance - **Title:** Generative Ai - **Duration:** 4m 35s - **Media link:** https://cdn.jwplayer.com/previews/WeSAoc6f - **Publish date (unix):** 1714422819 #### Streaming renditions - application/vnd.apple.mpegurl - audio/mp4 · AAC Audio · 113698 kbps - video/mp4 · 180p · 180p · 187728 kbps - video/mp4 · 270p · 270p · 249775 kbps - video/mp4 · 360p · 360p · 302429 kbps - video/mp4 · 406p · 406p · 344466 kbps - video/mp4 · 540p · 540p · 481456 kbps - video/mp4 · 720p · 720p · 722975 kbps - video/mp4 · 1080p · 1080p · 1675462 kbps #### Timed text tracks (delivery) - **thumbnails:** `https://cdn.jwplayer.com/strips/WeSAoc6f-120.vtt` #### Video transcript We looked at a couple different areas of AI, but the one that's gotten the most attention, and frankly is the most mainstream, is generative AI. And generative AI comes in many forms. Some applications generate written text, and you've probably used some of these tools, like Chats GPT, Google's Gemini, or Anthropic Cloud, while others are great for producing new images, like Midjourney, Dolly, and Stable Diffusion. Then there's others that are great for generating programming code, like GitHub Copilot. Then there's applications that will generate video or music tracks. Generative AI covers a broad spectrum of software tools and platforms, and the list seems to grow daily. Generative AI capabilities are appearing in tools that you probably already work with, products from Microsoft and Adobe, services that you might be familiar with, like Grammarly or even ContentStack. The key component of generative AI lies in the interaction. You input commands, typically through a brief prompt detailing your requirements, and the AI creates entirely new content, hence the word generative, which reflects the AI's ability to not merely retrieve existing data, but to actually create novel outcomes. Chatbots leverage something called Large Language Models, or LLMs, similar to the models we talked about earlier. They're trained on vast amounts of text data, and they're capable of generating human-like responses by leveraging deep learning and transformer architectures. Think of a transformer architecture as a conductor of an orchestra. The transformer has something called a self-attention mechanism, which allows it to focus on different sections of the orchestra, or input data, simultaneously, rather than one at a time. This enables the conductor to understand how each section contributes to the overall performance, adjusting focus dynamically to highlight or blend certain musical elements. In transformers, this translates to processing input data in parallel, allowing the model to assess the relevance of different data elements and grasp complex relationships. Additionally, there is an encoder and a decoder within the architecture. It functions in a similar way as a translator. The encoder absorbs and comprehensively represents the original language, while the decoder interprets and recreates this into new language, whether it be for a translation, a summarization, or generating text. This has proven exceptionally effective for natural language processing, serving as the foundational structure for most contemporary large language models. So you might ask, do AI tools that create images, music, or video also use large language models? Kind of, but they're referred to as foundation models, as they're multimodal, not just a tool for working with language. The underlining mechanism of any generative AI tool remains fairly consistent across different applications, whether it's creating text, images, code, whatever the case may be. A quick sidebar. An important concept to understand when working with any of these generative AI tools is this idea of a knowledge cutoff date. Because training these models is so computationally expensive, and it requires an enormous amount of data, the vendors often set a cutoff date, which is to say they'll stop using data up until a certain point in time, typically as close as they can get till today. But it's usually months earlier. So if you were to ask ChatGPT to summarize an event that occurred in the past few months, regardless of how significant the event, it might not be able to do it. To know what the date is of a knowledge cutoff, just ask the chatbot. Now that we have a general understanding of what's happening in the background with these AI tools, and we understand some foundational concepts like machine learning, deep learning, computation models, and LLMs, we can begin to explore how we can get the most out of these tools, and it often starts with a prompt. #### Key takeaways - Connect **Generative AI** back to your stack configuration before moving to the next module. - Capture one concrete artifact (screenshot, Postman call, or code snippet) that proves the step works in your environment. - Re-read the delivery versus management boundary for anything you changed in the entry model. ## Supplement for indexing ### Content summary Generative AI. Generative AI in AI Foundations (ai-foundations). ### Retrieval tags - Generative - ai-foundations - lesson 06 - Generative AI - ai-foundations lesson ### Indexing notes Index this lesson as a primary chunk tagged with lesson_id "06" and topics: [Generative]. Parent course slug: ai-foundations. Use asset_references URLs as thumbnail hints in search results when present. Never surface LMS quiz content or assessment answers from this file. ### Asset references | Label | URL | | --- | --- | | Video thumbnail: Generative AI | `https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/WeSAoc6f/poster.jpg?width=720` | ### External links | Label | URL | | --- | --- | | Contentstack Academy home | `https://www.contentstack.com/academy/` | | Training instance setup | `https://www.contentstack.com/academy/training-instance` | | Academy playground (GitHub) | `https://github.com/contentstack/contentstack-academy-playground` | | Contentstack documentation | `https://www.contentstack.com/docs/` |