 Many experts nowadays believe generative AI will have very significant impact on society and the economy, and that it is here to stay. Love it or hate it, but generative AI is going to play a role in our lives, and we'd better know something about it. So what is it? How does it work? Can you use it to your benefit? And importantly, does it also have downsides? Generative AI is software that can not only process text, images, sounds and other data that humans have produced, but that can also generate text, images and more. There are many different types of generative AI systems. The most well-known are large language models, such as the GPT-3 and GPT-4 models that underlie chat GPT. They are trained on enormous amounts of text, often written in lots of different languages. Books, blogs, Wikipedia, newspaper stories, social media messages and just about anything that anyone has ever written on the internet. They can generate new texts, usually in response to a question or an instruction from the user. These instructions are called prompts. Other generative AI models are trained on large amounts of images, computer code, audio with human speech or audio with human-made music. These models are proving to be extremely capable in generating new computer code, spoken language, images and music. And again, typically based on prompts in ordinary English. These systems have just become extremely powerful. And if you know how and when to use them, they can bring many benefits. It's worth experimenting with different ways of giving prompts to these systems and learning how others are integrating them into their workflow. Know what you can and cannot expect from them. Unfortunately, there are certainly also downsides to this technology. One big worry with large language models is that the statements they generate are not necessarily true. Moreover, there are many thorny issues about undesirable biases and stereotypes about intellectual property and deliberate abuse of these systems. The ethics of generative AI has therefore become a big topic that you and I will also need to think about a lot more.