Generative AI is a subsection of artificial intelligence with the function to produce many forms of content or data. The content is often text, images, or videos. "Generative AI can generate multimodal contents, including but not limited to text, audio, image, video, and even three-dimensional models." (Nah et. al.).

Due to its prevalence, "ChatGPT" has become a common example of gen. AI, but it is important to remember that this is only one of the popular gen. AIs. It is similar to how "Google it" has become common phrase despite countless other search engines. 

To elaborate more on the background of artificial intelligence as a whole, its creation is often placed circa 1956 where a program named Logic Theorist gave start to research under the name artificial intelligence; however, research on the subject was happening around ten years prior to this under the name machine intelligence (Moor).