What generative AI actually is

Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot are built on large language models: systems trained on huge amounts of text to predict what text is likely to come next, given what's come before. That's a very different thing from a search engine or a database.

A search engine finds and returns existing documents. A large language model generates new text, word by word, based on patterns it learned during training. It doesn't "look things up" in the way you might assume, unless it's specifically been given a tool to search the web or a document as part of the request.

This distinction matters constantly in how you should use these tools: they're extremely capable at generating plausible, well-structured text, but "plausible" and "correct" are not the same thing.