what is ai generative tools

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Willem van Aelst For hundreds of years, humans have engaged in the fine craft of art forgery. Indeed, in 1496, a 21-year-old Michelangelo faked a piece of a Roman sculpture, passing it to the Roman antiquarian Cardinal Raffaele Riario to make a quick buck. To pull off the con, the young Florentine artist rubbed acidic loam — dirt, basically — onto his own sculpture fragment in order to pass it off as

The adoption rate of AI tools has skyrocketed in the programming world, enabling coders to generate vast amounts of code with simple text prompts. Earlier this year, Google found that 90 percent of software developers across the industry are using AI tools on the job, up from a mere 14 percent last year. But all that convenience has come with some glaring drawbacks. The tools have repeatedly been found to be unreliable and inaccurate, which can lead to mis

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images For the tech of the future, generative AI sure is making a lot of enemies in a very short time. If 2023 was the year of AI’s awakening and 2024 the year of its frantic adoption, then it’s safe to say 2025 will be remembered as the year it all came crashing back down to reality. From boardrooms to classrooms, from game studios to Senate committees, this will be the year many remember as th

Getty / Futurism Law enforcement has quickly embraced AI for everything from drafting police reports to facial recognition. The results have been predictably dismal. In one particularly glaring — and unintentionally comedic — instance, the police department in Heber City, Utah, was forced to explain why a police report software declared that an officer had somehow shapeshifted into a frog. As Salt Lake City-based Fox 13 reports, the flawed tool seems to ha

In 1908, a Columbia University psychiatry professor named Frederick Peterson claimed to have built a “psychometer”—a contraption which he said could read people’s thoughts using, among other components, a mirror and a lamp. “It is almost like sorcery to observe the behavior of the instrument with a series of words, some purposely chosen to be emotionally indifferent and others to strike some emotional complex deep in the soul of the individual experimented

Credit: arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2505.04831 Chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude have experienced a meteoric rise in usage over the past three years because they can help you with a wide range of tasks. Whether you're writing Shakespearean sonnets, debugging code, or need an answer to an obscure trivia question, artificial intelligence (AI) systems seem to have you covered. The source of this versatility? Billions or even trillions of textual data poi

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A new study has revealed that the displacement of skilled workers by technology began nearly two decades ago—well before the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence that have sparked widespread concern over jobs becoming automated in the future. Published in the Socio-Economic Review, the research shows that leading sectors in the so-called "knowledge economy"—including finance, tech, and professional services—hav

Enterprise artificial intelligence investment is unprecedented, with IDC projecting global spending on AI and GenAI to double to $631 billion by 2028. Yet beneath the impressive budget allocations and boardroom enthusiasm lies a troubling reality: most organisations struggle to translate their AI ambitions into operational success.The sobering statistics behind AI’s promiseModelOp’s 2025 AI Governance Benchmark Report, based on input from 100 senior AI and

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images AI’s use in the legal sphere is the gift that keeps on giving. This time, it’s the sobering sense of disappointment that set in after a team building an AI chatbot for Alaska’s court system actually tested it and found out it was a hallucinating disaster, NBC News reports. The chatbot, dubbed the Alaska Virtual Assistant, was designed to help people handle forms and other procedures invol

Getty / Futurism Months before it mysteriously vaporized into thin air, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency ravaged the National Weather Service, leading to severe staffing shortages. While the Trump administration promised to rehire most of the around 550 lost jobs at the agency last summer, effectively admitting that DOGE had gone too far, the agency’s offices across the country are still struggling with many roles that remain unfil

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Move over, Ship of Theseus — there’s a new paradoxical thought experiment in town. Some power users of generative AI have grown so comfortable with their new tools — especially image-generating ones — that they now feel entitled to the specific prompts they use to churn out slop, as if the entire technology wasn’t based on the work of human artists that had been ingested without consent.

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images An indie game developer experienced a moment of profound moral clarity, and is now deleting his partially-AI-made game from the digital storefront Steam. The game, dubbed “Hardest,” is a free-to-play “rock-paper-scissors” roguelike card game released last July to mixed-to-negative reviews (of which there are barely thirty total.) Some users called it “soulless” and disparaged it for using

Getty / Futurism Since 2008, Stack Overflow has been an immensely helpful resource for developers, allowing them to crowdsource answers to their coding questions — and resulting in a vast online repository of coding knowledge. But as Dev Class reports, the advent of generative AI appears to have caused an extinction-level event for the platform, with the number of monthly questions plummeting significantly since around the time ChatGPT burst onto the scene

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Bandcamp, a major music distribution platform favored by indie artists, announced Tuesday that it would be “putting human creativity first” by outright banning AI-generated songs — and music aficionados are rejoicing. According to the company, music and audio generated “wholly or in substantial part by AI” will no longer be permitted on the platform. Furthermore, using AI tools “to impers

Getty / Futurism The use of generative AI for creative purposes has spawned a major countermovement. From game developers reeling from a wave of criticism for using the tech to artists staging mass protests against AI, the backlash against what’s being hailed as a technological revolution grew massively last year. In a startlingly literal example of this growing fury, a University of Alaska Fairbanks undergraduate student was detained after ripping “artwor

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images AI models are being unleashed into schools across the world, in a massive experiment on kids with uncertain results. Now, fresh research provides a clue about the tech’s effects on children’s education, and it’s not promising. According to a new study from Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education, AI poses profound risks to children’s social and intellectual development — an

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images While AI companies continue to command the global economy and pour billions of dollars into building data centers, it’s still not even clear that their products can deliver on one of their core premises: increasing productivity. One big skeptic of the tech’s economic promises is vice president and principal analyst at the global market analytics firm JP Gownder, who says we’re simply “not

Getty / Futurism The advent of generative AI has turned much of the internet into an unrecognizable flood plain of mind-numbing slop. In the latest sign of the times, the Economic Times — the second most widely-read English-language newspaper in the world, as of 2012 — picked the word “Kafkaesque” as its “Word of the Day” earlier this week. But even the briefest glance at the accompanying illustration reveals that the piece involved little, if any, human o

AI companies have already scraped much of the public internet to train their models. Now Amazon is turning to Twitch streamers. Twitch announced Wednesday that it is adding a new account setting that allows users to opt out of having content from their channels used to train parent company Amazon’s generative AI models. The catch is the the setting is turned on by default. “Generative AI content models are AI tools that can help create or synthesize conten

Examples of AI art exhibitions. Credit: Retos (2025). DOI: 10.17163/ret.n29.2025.01 Artificial intelligence is transforming the creative process. AI can not only generate complex texts, high-quality images, and videos in just a few minutes. It can also support creative thinking and act as a research tool in the stages prior to artistic production. However, its adoption also raises ethical concerns around issues such as originality, authorship, ownership, a