Lesson 1: What is Generative AI?
What is AI?
Section titled “What is AI?”AI is software that performs tasks typically requiring human intelligence — recognising images, translating languages, making decisions from data. It has been around for decades in various forms, from rule-based expert systems to modern machine-learning models.
What is Generative AI?
Section titled “What is Generative AI?”Generative AI is a subset of AI that creates new content — text, images, code, audio — based on patterns learned from training data. When you ask ChatGPT a question or use GitHub Copilot to complete a function, you are using generative AI.
Is it intelligent?
Section titled “Is it intelligent?”Not in the way we are. It has no understanding, no awareness. It recognises patterns and produces outputs that look coherent. What we know: it is powerful and useful. What we feel about it: that depends on who you ask.
The key distinction is between narrow intelligence (what current AI has — excelling at specific tasks) and general intelligence (what humans have — the ability to reason across any domain). Every AI system available today is narrow.
What it can do well
Section titled “What it can do well”- Generate and edit text, code, and structured data
- Summarise and transform documents
- Answer questions based on provided context
- Translate between languages
- Recognise patterns in large datasets
What it cannot do
Section titled “What it cannot do”- Understand meaning the way humans do
- Reason about things outside its training data
- Guarantee factual accuracy (it can and does hallucinate)
- Access real-time information unless explicitly connected to external tools
- Replace critical thinking and human judgement
Why this matters
Section titled “Why this matters”Before using any AI tool effectively — including ReArch — you need a realistic mental model of what the technology can and cannot do. The rest of this course builds that model, one concept at a time.