Generative AI (GenAI for short) is a type of artificial intelligence that recognises patterns using what it has been taught in order to produce new content in response to a written input or prompt. The output can take many different forms - text, audio, code or images, for example. These are also known as LLMs (Large Language Models).
NOTE: Remember, new content does not mean new ideas.
LLMs have been trained by being given access to massive amounts of data and they respond to your prompt very quickly by looking through that data and producing a response to your prompt cased on probability. The most likely combination is made into a response according to the parameters of your prompt. In that case, they often tell you what you want to hear, instead of providing you with facts. Furthermore, it is not publicly known exactly what sources were used to train LLMs, how scholarly they are, how research resources are represented, or what percentage was from social media.
Because anything you feed into LLMs can be added to their training data, you should never share any personal information about yourself or other people when using these tools.
ALWAYS verify the information that GenAI outputs. This can usually be done by a quick Google search and using an authoritative source to double-check the facts.