Generative AI are tools that, in response to your prompt, draw on data to generate new and original content. They use data to generate new and original content in a conversational way.
The new content can be in the form of images, text, video or audio.
The AI tool is fed a large amount of internet-based data which it looks for patterns in. It learns to predict the next word in a sentence and write based on that. When you ask it to do something, it draws on its extensive (but not exhaustive) data sources to generate a response.