Applications of Generative AI to Media

Abstract

When ChatGPT was released in November 2022, the public became aware of a new era of artificial intelligence (AI) built on a class of machine learning models known as foundation models (FMs). Although FMs burst upon the scene seemingly without precedent, the roots of FMs go back several years earlier. A key distinguishing factor of FMs versus older models is their powerful applications to Generative AI (GenAI), the use of models to generate new content and transform existing content. GenAI models tend to be general-purpose and more flexible than previous kinds of AI models, which are limited to specific predictive tasks such as object detection in images, text classification, forecasting, or detecting data anomalies. Although there were some other kinds of GenAI models before the rise of FMs, FMs are much more powerful and are an enormous leap over their predecessors.