Research Guides: Artificial Intelligence in the Academic Health Sciences: Types of Generative AI

Types of Generative AI

These small lists provide a sample of available generative AI. For a comprehensive list of generative AI products for postsecondary faculty and students, see Ithaka S+R’s Generative AI Product Tracker.

For an evaluation of the terms and conditions of generative AI, see Jisc's advice and guidance.

Text Generators

What are Text Generators?
Software that generates text by collecting countless data from existing content, such as books, articles, websites, search engines, and even videos on the Internet. Based on what people have written so far, AI generators can recognize patterns and trends and propose new ideas for creating more and better quality texts. The resource material is analyzed to find patterns and relationships and create new texts by predicting the word or sentence most likely to follow another in a sequence. Text generators can be used to produce a wide variety of content including essays, memos, brochures, poems, songs, and screenplays.

Some available Text Generators

Copilot - Developed by Microsoft. Copilot is an artificial intelligence (AI) platform, which uses multiple data models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, and DALL-E 3, to generate written and visual content based on a prompt.
ChatGPT - Developed by OpenAI. ChatGPT basic version is free.
Gemini (formerly Bard) - Developed by Google. Has similar text generation capabilities to ChatGPT, with the addition of image generation functionality.

Image Generators

What are Image Generators?
Image generators analyze sets of images with captions or text descriptions. Once they learn which images are associated with which concepts, they can combine them to create new images in a range of styles from photorealistic to abstract.

Some available Image Generators

Dall-E - developed by OpenAI. Features include text to image generation, expanding images (outpainting), editing existing images (inpainting), and creating variations of original images.
Midjourney - The lowest learning curve and best quality images according to Ithaka S+R's Generative AI Product Tracker. Need to have a (free) Discord account to use.
Adobe Firefly - According to Jisc's evaluation, user inputs are not used to train models.

Video Generators

What are Video Generators?
Video generators create videos based on text prompts or uploaded/linked videos, documents, or images.

Some available Video Generators

Kapwing - The Kapwing video generator allows you to create videos based on an uploaded video or document, video link, or text prompt. You can also edit the outputted videos using the video editor. Kapwing can also be used to create images and gifs.
Runway - The Runway video generator allows you to create videos based on a text prompt, uploaded image, uploaded image with a description, or uploaded videos. It also allows you to apply styles to videos using either presets or text prompts, and edit videos using tools like motion paintbrushes.
Synthesia - Allows you to choose a video template, and create videos based on a website link, document, or text prompt. You can choose the number of scenes, objective of the video, audience, language, speaker, and tone. It also allows you to edit the outputted video in a video editor. The videos are structured like presentations (i.e., you have an AI character that talks onscreen during the video, and the video editor looks like a slideshow presentation).