Generative AI

AI that creates — text, images, code, audio, video. What does that mean for teachers?

Generative AI is the branch of AI that creates new content. Rather than just classifying or predicting (for example, "is this email spam?"), it generates something that did not exist before — a paragraph, a piece of code, an image, or an email draft.

What can generative AI do?

Select a capability below to see a realistic example of what generative AI produces.

Select a capability to preview an example output

Hi Sarah, I wanted to follow up on our conversation last Tuesday about the accessibility toolkit renewal. I have put together a brief summary of the three licensing options we discussed, along with pricing for your team of 45 users. Would Thursday at 2pm work for a quick call to go over these? Best regards, Gavin.

What generative AI means for your role

For most people on the teaching staff, you will interact with generative AI primarily through text. Here is what that looks like day to day.

Emails

Draft, respond to, or polish customer emails in seconds. Give AI the context about the situation and recipient; it provides a professional first draft.

Documents

Summarise long reports, create meeting notes, draft proposals, and convert bullet points into polished prose.

Thinking partner

Work through a decision, get a contrary view, or generate options you had not considered. AI is a useful sounding board at any stage of a project.

Code

Generate, explain, debug, and review code. Developers can work significantly faster with AI as a pair programming partner.

Think of it as a brilliant but overconfident intern

Generative AI is fast, willing to attempt anything, and remarkably capable — but it needs clear direction, it can misunderstand context, and it sometimes confidently produces things that are wrong. Your job is to guide it, check its work, and use your own expertise to refine the output.

Knowledge check

A colleague asks: "Is AI making up the content it writes, or is it finding answers from a database?" What is the correct answer?

Exactly right. LLMs generate new text token by token based on learned patterns. This is why they can create unique content — and also why they can occasionally be wrong.

Not quite. Generative AI creates original output by predicting the most likely continuation of your prompt. It does not retrieve from a database.