When new content is created by artificial intelligence, it’s called generative AI. This could involve generating text, images, videos, music, or even voices. To do this, you provide a description in a chat dialogue box of what you want the AI to create. This description is known as a “prompt.” Generative AI tools can provide answers to all sorts of questions, summarise complex information, and generate diverse ideas quickly. Depending on how they are used, they can create short stories, paintings, pieces of code, or even musical compositions. The foundation for this creation lies in large amounts of data that the AI system accesses to identify patterns and similarities. The content produced by the AI is new, and it’s often impressive, making it challenging to distinguish from content created by humans. However, generative AI can also be misused. In the case of “deepfakes,” AI is used to produce images or videos that appear to be real but are actually fabricated. AI-generated text is also often hard to recognise as machine-made. Additionally, the AI can provide answers that sound correct but are actually incorrect—a phenomenon known as “hallucinating.” The quality of what’s created by generative AI depends on both the quality of the data used and the quality of the prompts given. To effectively utilise generative AI, we need to learn how to guide the tools with meaningful prompts and use them thoughtfully. Generative AI holds immense potential and can assist us in many ways, such as serving as a writing or learning partner. However, while the AI does the hard work, humans must remain responsible for the facts and the final output.