Chatbots & Generative AI

✍️ Generative AI

Generative AI creates new content: text, images, music, or computer code. AI chatbots write answers, and image generators turn a short description into a picture. They work by learning patterns from enormous amounts of existing text and images.

🔮 Predicting the next word

A chatbot is built on a large language model. It was trained on billions of sentences to predict what word, or piece of a word, comes next. To answer you, it predicts one piece, adds it, and predicts again, over and over. The explainer above does the same thing with just a few sentences.

🤥 Confident but wrong

Because a chatbot predicts likely-sounding words rather than looking up facts, it can make things up, such as fake dates, quotes or sources, and say them confidently. This is often called "hallucination". Always check important facts against a reliable source, like your textbook, a teacher or an official website.

🌍 What it knows depends on its data

A model only knows patterns from its training data, which stops at a certain date. Languages with less text online, like Kiswahili, Sheng and other Kenyan languages, usually get weaker answers than English. Missing or one-sided data shows up in the answers.

💬 Good prompts, good use

A prompt is what you type to the chatbot. Clear prompts get better answers: say who you are, what you need, and how you want it ("Explain photosynthesis to a Grade 7 learner in 5 short points"). Use it to explain, quiz you, or give feedback, not to do your work for you.

Key points

• Generative AI creates new text, images, music or code.
• A chatbot predicts the next word again and again.
• It can make up facts and sound very sure about them.
• Always check important facts against a reliable source.
• It knows only what was in its training data, which ends at a certain date.
• Kiswahili and Sheng answers are often weaker, because there was less training text.
• Clear prompts get better answers.

Try it for real: Predict like a chatbot

• In the explainer, start with "the" and keep picking the most likely word. Does the sentence make sense? Then add your own sentence and see how the predictions change.
• If you have permission to use a chatbot, ask it something you already know well, and check every fact it gives.