How AI works · the AI that came before
Generative AI vs the older kind
30-second gist~30s read
When most people say AI in 2026, they mean generative AI — systems that produce text, images, audio, or video. The chatbots are the visible part.
But AI has been quietly running other things for years: Netflix recommendations, your bank's fraud detector, your inbox's spam filter, the queue at the airport. Those are AI too — just narrower, older, less talkative kinds.
If you want more
The two families, in plain words
- Generative AI creates new content from a prompt: text, images, code, audio, video. The newest, the loudest, the one driving the news.
- Predictive / classifying AI takes information and outputs a decision: "is this transaction fraud?", "is this email spam?", "how likely is this customer to leave?". Older, quieter, and absolutely everywhere.
Why this distinction matters
When the news talks about "AI" without specifying which kind, you can usually work it out from the context. A story about a chatbot saying something wild is generative; a story about a hiring algorithm being unfair is predictive. The two raise different questions, and the same fix doesn't always work.