Generative AI refers to a class of artificial intelligence systems that can create new content—text, images, audio, video, code, and more—by learning patterns from training data. Unlike discriminative models that classify or predict from existing inputs, generative models learn the underlying distribution of data to produce novel outputs that resemble the training examples. This technology has transformed creative workflows, software development, scientific research, and business operations through models like GPT, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion. A key insight: while these models appear to "understand" content, they fundamentally operate by predicting likely continuations based on statistical patterns, which shapes both their capabilities and limitations in reasoning, factual accuracy, and consistency.