AI basics

Activity overview: What can GenAI tools do?

An image is displayed of 5 selectable icons, as follows:

• Text content
• Images
• Sound and video
• Code and 3D models
• Research discovery.

The interactivity

The user can click on the icons to reveal examples of what GenAI tools can generate.

Revealed information

• Text content: AI tools that generate text responses are trained on a massive amount of data. The training process involves consuming large amounts of text from books, articles, and websites, then analysing the text to find patterns and relationships in human language. Once it is trained, it can create new text based on an analysis of human language. These tools can translate languages, summarise long passages of text, answer questions, provide data insights, write jokes and more. Text-based GenAI tools can produce a range of content, such as essays, blog posts, reviews, poetry, scripts, reflective statements, news articles, role-playing scenarios and product descriptions.
• Images: Image based GenAI tools can create novel images from text prompts (, for example, original images for your slide deck, or a cartoon illustrating a complex biological mechanism). You can ask the model to generate images that have never before been drawn or seen. You can also ask for specific styles of imagery (, for example, impressionist, graphic design, art deco, digital images).Not only can they produce diverse images in various styles, they can also generate images of everyday objects, landscapes, abstract art, and mashups combining multiple objects and concepts.
• Sound and video: Sound and video based GenAI tools can generate content such as music compositions in a range of genres, sound effects for movies and games or human-looking avatars. AI music generators analyse music tracks and metadata (artist name, album name, genre, year song was released, etc.) to identify patterns and features. They can also be trained on lyrics associated with songs and some can produce sheet music. Other sound and video based tools can mimic voices to generate voiceovers, create video content and even edit videos including cutting clips, applying artistic styling and enhancing the resolution.
• Coding and 3D models: Coding and 3D model based GenAI tools can create software applications and scripts, recommend improvements to code and even find errors and fix bugs. They can assist in designing websites and templates, creating models, characters and animations, architectural designs and interior layouts.
• Research discovery: Research discovery based GenAI tools can automate parts of the research process and make long, complex texts easier to decipher by extracting key information or summarising a paper. This type of AI often analyses research papers that users upload. They can also help with literature review mapping and citation.