This article is within the scope of WikiProject Technology, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of
technology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join
the discussion and see a list of open tasks.TechnologyWikipedia:WikiProject TechnologyTemplate:WikiProject TechnologyTechnology articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Artificial Intelligence, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of
Artificial intelligence on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join
the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Artificial IntelligenceWikipedia:WikiProject Artificial IntelligenceTemplate:WikiProject Artificial IntelligenceArtificial Intelligence articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Visual arts, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of
visual arts on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join
the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Visual artsWikipedia:WikiProject Visual artsTemplate:WikiProject Visual artsvisual arts articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computer graphics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of
computer graphics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join
the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Computer graphicsWikipedia:WikiProject Computer graphicsTemplate:WikiProject Computer graphicscomputer graphics articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computer science, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of
Computer science related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join
the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Computer scienceWikipedia:WikiProject Computer scienceTemplate:WikiProject Computer scienceComputer science articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Software, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of
software on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join
the discussion and see a list of open tasks.SoftwareWikipedia:WikiProject SoftwareTemplate:WikiProject Softwaresoftware articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Linguistics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of
linguistics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join
the discussion and see a list of open tasks.LinguisticsWikipedia:WikiProject LinguisticsTemplate:WikiProject LinguisticsLinguistics articles
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computing, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of
computers,
computing, and
information technology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join
the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ComputingWikipedia:WikiProject ComputingTemplate:WikiProject ComputingComputing articles
The New York Times definition is Silicon Valley has been gripped by a frenzy over start-ups working on “generative” A.I., technologies that can generate text, images and other media in response to short prompts.[1]
The Pinaya et al. definition is Generative AI refers to a set of artificial intelligence techniques and models designed to learn the underlying patterns and structure of a dataset and generate new data points that plausibly could be part of the original dataset.[2]
The NYT definition can be objected to on the grounds that
GAN is generative but does not take prompts as input. NYT was probably conflating the broader category of
Generative model with the specific category of
Generative pre-trained transformer and similar transformer-based architectures, which happened to become popular in 2022. Furthermore the "text, images and other media" part can be objected to on the grounds that a
Generative model can generate outputs such as robot actions and industrial HVAC control[3] which are not creative media.
The Pinaya et al. definition can be objected to on the grounds that it doesn't mean much to a Wikipedia reader who is not an expert in the subject. The common usage of "Generative AI" in 2023, and the reason readers will be looking it up, is to refer to systems like
ChatGPT,
Midjourney, and so on.
To find a balance, I'm editing the lede to refer first to the more general academic/historical definition (essentially a synonym for
Generative model), and then to the more specific common modern usage.
Lwneal (
talk) 12:17, 11 August 2023 (UTC)reply
Synthetic Media vs. Generative Artificial Intelligence
It has been suggested that the article
Synthetic media be merged into this one.
Per that article, "Synthetic media" is "a catch-all term for the artificial production... [of] media by automated means". This includes mechanical, symbolic, and procedural generation systems which have never been referred to as "Generative AI"
Specifically, the first example given in the
Synthetic media article is
Maillardet's_automaton, which clearly predates any generative AI system (or indeed any AI system)
Conversely, the most notable generative AI systems are large language models, which are not mentioned in
Synthetic media. I can find no usage connecting LLMs to that term in any of either article's citations.
Per Google Trends, the phrase "Generative AI" was almost unknown before the year 2022, but became increasingly common starting in October 2022 (the month after the release of
Stable_Diffusion). The search term "Generative AI" appears to be at least 100 times more common than "Synthetic Media" as of 2023.
Based on these facts I suggest that the two articles not be merged, and that "Generative AI" continue to refer to the specific type of AI that became extremely well-known starting in late 2022: the type of AI that uses a neural network to understand natural language prompts.
Lwneal (
talk) 17:09, 19 May 2023 (UTC)reply
The term "
Deepfake" came into usage in 2018, referring to a controversial type of image manipulation technology which uses deep neural networks to convincingly edit the faces of people in video, notably for pornographic or propagandistic purposes. It is a common search term.
The term "
Generative AI" came into usage in 2022, referring to a newer type of technology (the pretrained
transformer) which uses deep neural networks to translate natural language commands ("prompts") into text, images, video, etc. This technology is also controversial, but for different reasons. It is a common search term.
"
Synthography" is not in common usage outside of Wikipedia and appears to be a recently-coined neologism synonymous with
Artificial intelligence art. Several sources cited in
Synthography do not themselves contain the word "Synthography".
Computational creativity covers a broad and difficult-to-define topic, but does cite sources. The article is well-researched but somewhat out of date. It is not a common search term.
"
Artificial imagination" is not in common usage outside of Wikipedia. The article is not particularly well researched and cites sources that do not contain the phrase "Artificial imagination".
Do these seem reasonable?
Lwneal (
talk) 18:05, 4 August 2023 (UTC)reply
Yes, the mergers you have proposed sound like a good start! I'd say that there are a few problems with this analysis of these article, because it is largely based on the articles themselves that have their own problems. For example, "Generative artificial intelligence" has been a common concept in the field for decades. "Generative Art" has been a concept since at least the1960s, quickly looking at my books I've got an MIT Press book that talks about "generative artificial intelligence" that came out in 2009, "Generative Adversarial Networks" have been around since 2014, but here on Wikipedia we have an article written on "Generative artificial intelligence" that makes it sound like this didn't exist before 2023, likely because that's when the majority of the article's contributors first learned about it. This is part of the problem that hopefully merging some of these articles can help fix, where editor knowledge isn't split across so many similar articles, with some of these articles showing glaring problems because relatively few editors are looking at them. So, yes, the mergers you have proposed sound like a good start! Thanks,
Elspea756 (
talk) 19:35, 4 August 2023 (UTC)reply
I suspect a problem with many of the articles in this space is one of overlapping definitions. For example, the word "Generative":
"Generative" the statistical machine learning term which means "models the joint probability distribution of the training dataset", opposite of "discriminative"
"Generative" the dictionary word which means "creative, capable of originating or producing"
The nerds who invented
GAN and
GPT probably intended the former definition. But the public at large increasingly uses it in the latter sense- especially because the most famous "generative" systems to date can output art and poetry, which seems closely related to creativity.
This gets tricky when AI that models joint probability is used for non-creative tasks like robot control, and when AI that doesn't (for example, decision tree AI) is used for creative tasks like painting pictures. Which one is "generative"? Both?
That 2009 book sounds interesting. Maybe looking back to the earliest published instances of the phrase "Generative artificial intelligence" can decide the issue.
Lwneal (
talk) 17:31, 10 August 2023 (UTC)reply
For reference, pageviews during the last year for many of the terms compared by Lwneal:
[1] --
LaukkuTheGreit (
Talk•
Contribs) 08:33, 20 September 2023 (UTC)reply
no deleting to keep the revision history
Sebbog13 (
talk) 19:56, 4 August 2023 (UTC)reply
Right, yes, nothing would be deleted from revision histories when merging, and there will be redirects from the previous articles to the article they've been merged into, so that existing links still work and people searching for the previous title will find the article it has been merged into.
Elspea756 (
talk) 20:12, 4 August 2023 (UTC)reply
I agree. Keep them separate. They can reference each other.
193.116.103.233 (
talk) 03:16, 3 September 2023 (UTC)reply
Wiki Education assignment: Research Process and Methodology - SU23 - Sect 200 - Thu
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 24 May 2023 and 10 August 2023. Further details are available
on the course page. Student editor(s):
NoemieCY (
article contribs).
— Assignment last updated by
NoemieCY (
talk) 13:08, 14 July 2023 (UTC)reply
Added Benefits and Risks
I added benfits and risks of generative AI. This is based on an expert briefing of the UN Security Council in July 2023.
MensaGlobetrotter (
talk) 21:24, 24 July 2023 (UTC)reply
Thank you for your contribution, it adds valuable context. However, it appears to have been written in the style of ChatGPT's default "helpful assistant" mode, which is excessively wordy and repetitive. Because of this, the new section takes up approximately half of the entire article.
If you did use an LLM to assist in this summary, would you consider re-prompting with a different system prompt? For example, "Summarize the above text. Do not repeat yourself. Be concise." Or you might summarize the briefing in your own words, using the LLM only as a reading tool. See
/info/en/?search=Wikipedia:Using_neural_network_language_models_on_WikipediaLwneal (
talk) 20:43, 25 July 2023 (UTC)reply
Thanks for your comments. I had used LLM to hone in on and split out benefits and risks. These were spread across a very long article, and I was worried that I would miss content or introduce bias. I have reworked the sections in question with much more manual effort.
MensaGlobetrotter (
talk) 21:46, 25 July 2023 (UTC)reply
I've removed this section that was largely written by ChatGPT. The entire section was mostly or completely untrue and had nothing to do with generative AI, instead describing other types of AI. The source says it is describing "generative and other artificial intelligence." For example, generative AI is not being used for "autonomous weapons systems."
Elspea756 (
talk) 12:19, 26 July 2023 (UTC)reply
You do make some valid points. However, please consider the possibility that your definition of generative AI is too narrow. Please also consider deleting just the points you find problematic. The first risk noted was that generative AI is "capable of autonomously creating content, raises concerns about the spread of disinformation and hate speech, potentially becoming a defining moment for such threats.". Is this not a risk of generative AI?
MensaGlobetrotter (
talk) 14:11, 26 July 2023 (UTC)reply
In the 1980's and 1990's, the term "Generative Planning" or "Generative AI Planning" was used in some academic AI literature such as this[1] article published by a NASA team in 1997:
"Our deliberator is a traditional generative AI planner based on the HSTS planning framework (Muscettola 1994)"
"HSTS (Heuristic Scheduling Testbed System) is a representation and problem solving framework that provides an integrated view of planning and scheduling... In the paper we describe an integrated planner and scheduler for short term scheduling of the Hubble Space Telescope"
Does this mean the Hubble Space Telescope was running an early version of ChatGPT?
^Pell, Barney; Bernard, Douglas E.; Chien, Steve A.; Gat, Erann; Muscettola, Nicola; Nayak, P. Pandurang; Wagner, Michael D.; Williams, Brian C. (1998). Bekey, George A. (ed.). An Autonomous Spacecraft Agent Prototype. Autonomous Robots Volume 5, No. 1. pp. 29–45. Our deliberator is a traditional generative AI planner based on the HSTS planning framework (Muscettola, 1994), and our control component is a traditional spacecraft attitude control system (Hackney et al. 1993). We also add an architectural component explicitly dedicated to world modeling (the mode identifier), and distinguish between control and monitoring.
Extremely unhappy because the Generative AI concept has been hijacked by large language models
I am extremely unhappy with the current framing of generative AI as being derived from / being a variant of transformers and large language models. The fact that LLMs generate paragraphs of text is not a sufficient argument. Historically, the generative AI movement stems from Generative Adversarial networks. The seminal article by Goodfellow (60k citations) is not even mentioned in this Wikipedia entry. This is a rewriting of history and is an usurpation by text people of fundamental findings from pixel people. Yuck. It reminds me of my student who said in a presentation that 'neural networks started with Krishevsky'.
129.125.178.72 (
talk) 11:59, 2 October 2023 (UTC)reply
I agree that this article should include more detail on pre-2020 unsupervised deep learning. Generative Adversarial Nets should get their due (and perhaps also Boltzmann machines, Deep Belief nets, etc).
Edits are welcome.
I disagree with the characterization of pixel people as antagonistic to text people. They're often the same people! Ian Goodfellow and Ilya Sutskever were co-authors
[2] even before the original GAN paper. Alec Radford, after DCGAN
[3], went on to work with Sutskever on GPT-2 and GPT-3
[4]. Vaswani and Parmar wrote "Attention Is All You Need"
[5], and they also wrote "Image Transformer"
[6].
If there ever was a distinction between text people and pixel people in AI, it ended when
the text people were all fired. Most of the key deep learning researchers of the 2010s, whether they trained on image or text data, used the same methods and were associated through co-authorship to one community. In fact, many of them were students of
the same three professors.
Lwneal (
talk) 23:34, 2 October 2023 (UTC)reply
Wiki Education assignment: Technology and Culture
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 21 August 2023 and 15 December 2023. Further details are available
on the course page. Student editor(s):
Nadpnw,
AdvaitPanicker,
Ferna235 (
article contribs).
— Assignment last updated by
Thecanyon (
talk) 05:32, 12 December 2023 (UTC)reply
Wiki Education assignment: Intro to Technical Writing
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 19 February 2024 and 18 March 2024. Further details are available
on the course page. Student editor(s):
Tskhattab (
article contribs).
— Assignment last updated by
Tskhattab (
talk) 22:37, 21 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Energy consumption?
Shouldn't there be a section about the very high energy consumption required to create and run generative IT?
Rosieredfield (
talk) 18:44, 28 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Totally agree! Maybe it's time to make my first ever edit...
Ogre.Yoga (
talk) 02:12, 2 April 2024 (UTC)reply
Relevance of AlphaFold
Is AlphaFold really considered generative AI, as suggested in the
subsection "Molecules"? My impression is that it predicts the 3D structure of folded proteins, but does not really generate something in the usual sense.
Alenoach (
talk) 19:04, 30 April 2024 (UTC)reply
I believe technically it generates predictions. It is strange, however, that on their website I am unable to find any mention of generative AI (outside of "you can generate your own AlphaFold predictions using") but I know anecdotally AlphaFold is seen as genAI.
Sojoelous (
talk) 22:43, 8 May 2024 (UTC)reply
Misuse in journalism
Some of the content of the subsection "Misuse in journalism" is not necessarily misuse, and could arguably be moved to the article
Applications of artificial intelligence, especially given that this subsection is quite lengthy. There isn't yet an article about "Artificial intelligence in journalism", but creating one would be another option.
Alenoach (
talk) 02:15, 27 May 2024 (UTC)reply