GENERATIVE AI
Gen AI has burst into the world over the last few years and created things we did not think were possible. It includes showing you what you could look like riding a unicorn across the moon and weaving itself into the fabric of enterprise operations worldwide.
Yet the commercialisation of Gen AI is raising questions and anxieties about authenticity, consent and human creativity that society has barely begun to address.
The technology’ s origins were in 2014, when researcher Ian Goodfellow was debating machine learning( ML) over drinks with colleagues in a Montreal pub – and he cracked the code for Generative Adversarial Networks( GANs).
His breakthrough – pitting two neural networks against each other to generate increasingly convincing synthetic images – sparked a new genre of AI.
What started as blurry, pixelated faces has evolved into systems producing photorealistic video, synthesising convincing audio and creating digital humans virtually indistinguishable from real people.
These models now touch nearly every sector, trained on vast datasets of human creativity and promising efficiency gains.
But the problem is, the same technology that helps businesses slash costs can also create realistic incriminating videos, bring people visually back from the dead and be used for malicious intent.
190 January 2026