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2 How does Generative AI work?

Many of us use AI in our everyday lives: spelling and grammar check, autocomplete, chatbots and more. We often ask AI to complete a concrete task for us – like asking Alexa to play music (using voice recognition).

Try it: Google vs Google Gemini

Try comparing these tools with your own prompts and see what kind of responses you get.

Do you get specific-enough answers?

GenAI is a little bit different from Siri or Alexa and is also not a supercharged Google search. If you ask both a Google search and Google Gemini “What are the five most popular sources for information about cat videos and mental health?”  you get drastically different answers.

Video: How do GenAI tools work?

What happens during training?

During training, a GenAI is fed a vast amount of training data, from which the GenAI learns patterns and relationships. From this the GenAI develops the ability to generate new content that resembles its training data.

The quality, origin, and diversity of the training data is crucial to the quality of the outputs.  GenAI can “hallucinate” and provide factual inaccuracies in its output.

How do I use it?

GenAI tools operate by prompting. Think of it as something like describing a task that you want the GenAI to perform for you.

The quality of the prompt is just as important as the quality of the data set that the tool was trained on.

When prompted, GenAI doesn’t just recall information, but it is able to pull together different types of patterns to produce a new output based on probability.  Meaning, it’s predicting the next word or sentence that’s going to come up based on the billions of words within its training data set.

AI image generators learn by looking at a huge collection of images and their corresponding text descriptions. The training process involves the model learning the relationship between words and visual concepts, styles, and objects. After this training, when you provide a text prompt, the model can create a new unique image based on the patterns and associations that it has learned.

Example prompt for creative use of GenAI

Can you create a realistic image of this imaginary animal that has these characteristics?

Google Gemini generated imaginary animal that has these characteristics: purple scales on the round chameleon-like body tail like a lion except more yellow Feet are like a stick - the back ones are yellow have yellow claws and the front has lavender flippers - the face is like a cat but with round ears and is sky blue The eyes are golden and shaped like a circle its mouth is a orange-ish yellow beak it has golden wings that are not feathered but small like a hummingbird
Google Gemini generated image from the example prompt. Prompt created by author’s daughter of an imaginary animal called a “Marthey.”
  • purple scales on the round chameleon-like body
  • a yellow tail like a lion
  • Feet are like a stick – the back ones are yellow have yellow claws and the front has lavender flippers.
  • the face is like a cat but with round ears and is sky blue
  • the eyes are golden and shaped like a circle
  • its mouth is a yellow beak
  • it has golden wings that are not feathered but small like a hummingbird.

 

Next: Learn about some capabilities of GenAI

 

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GenAI+U: A Student Learning Experience Copyright © 2025 by University of Minnesota Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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