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 based on probability. The most likely combination is made into a response according to the parameters of your prompt.
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.
REMEMBER: Always verify the information that GenAI outputs.