Generative AI

Generative AI is the broad category of artificial intelligence systems that produce new content — text, images, audio, video, code, structured data — rather than only analyzing existing content. The category is built on foundation models trained on massive datasets and exposed to users through interfaces like ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), Llama (Meta), and Midjourney (image).

The Technical Layer

The underlying systems are large language models for text, diffusion models for images, and increasingly multimodal architectures that handle text, image, audio, and video inside a single model. The breakthrough that opened the consumer category was ChatGPT's launch in November 2022, which crossed 100 million users in two months — the fastest consumer adoption curve in technology history.

What It Changed for Commerce

Generative AI moved the buyer research surface from search-and-click to ask-and-answer. More than a third of consumers now begin product research inside a generative AI system, not Google. The brands and executives who shape what those systems say about a category — through GEO, earned media, and citation infrastructure — capture the buyer before the click.

The Reputational Frontier

Generative AI also produces hallucinations — confident, fluent claims that are factually false. When a model hallucinates about a brand or person, the result is a new crisis category with no journalist to call and no single source to correct. Managing how generative AI portrays a client is now a comms discipline in its own right.