AI Glossaries

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a technique that asks an AI model to work through a problem in intermediate steps before giving its final answer, which improves accuracy on maths, logic and multi-step tasks.

Few-shot prompting is including a small number of worked examples, showing an input and the desired output, in a prompt so the AI model learns the pattern and applies it to a new input.

Zero-shot prompting is giving an AI model a task using only instructions, without any examples of the desired output. The model relies on what it learned during training to understand and complete the task.

Prompt engineering is the practice of designing and refining the instructions, context and examples given to an AI model so it produces accurate, useful and consistent output.

AI hallucination is when a generative AI model produces information that sounds plausible and confident but is false, made up or unsupported by its sources, such as invented facts, quotes, citations or statistics.

Synthetic media is any image, audio, video or text that is generated or significantly altered by artificial intelligence. It includes AI art, synthetic voices and deepfakes, and brings both creative opportunities and serious risks of deception.

Multimodal AI is artificial intelligence that can understand, combine or generate more than one type of data, such as text, images, audio and video, for example answering questions about a photo or generating an image from text.

Speech-to-text (STT), also called automatic speech recognition (ASR), is technology that converts spoken audio into written text. It powers transcription, captions, voice assistants and call analytics.

Text-to-speech (TTS) is technology that converts written text into spoken audio. Modern neural TTS uses deep learning to produce natural-sounding speech with realistic rhythm, emphasis and tone.

Text-to-video is a generative AI technique that creates a short video clip from a written description. It extends image generation across time, so the model must keep objects, lighting and motion consistent from frame to frame.

Text-to-image is a generative AI technique that creates a new image from a written description. A text encoder turns the prompt into numbers, and an image model, usually a diffusion model, generates a picture that matches it.

AI music generation uses generative AI to compose melodies, create full songs with vocals, produce background tracks or generate sound effects from text prompts, audio examples or musical notation.

AI image generation is the use of generative AI to create new images or edit existing ones from text prompts, sketches or reference photos. It covers text-to-image, image editing, inpainting, style transfer and upscaling.

AI-generated content (AIGC) is any text, image, audio, video or code produced fully or partly by generative AI. It is now common in marketing, publishing and business communication, and its value depends on accuracy, originality and human oversight.

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that creates new content, such as text, images, audio, video and code, by learning patterns from large amounts of existing data and producing original output in response to a prompt.