Generative Artificial Intelligence refers to AI models that generate new content in the form of written text, audio, images and video. They do this through training on internet data and then statistically predicting the next word in a sentence by looking for relationships in the data. Text is broken down into smaller, machine readable units called tokens, which are words or characters. They learn patterns in the text and generate text that follows those patterns.
In the same way, Generative Learners generate content in their minds eye for learning by imagining what it would look like. They see the senses as data collection instruments. Everyday we see, listen, feel, smell and taste things. These stimuli can be seen as data points that can be used to learn from the environment. By clumping these stimuli together we get experiences. The more experiences a learner has the better their ability to generate.
Generative learners use their past experiences to compare them to new information they encounter to look for similar relationships and patterns. For example, when reading text from a book they could generate images from the text in comparison to past similar experiences in order to create meaning.
To take it even further, when trying to solve a problem and planning in advance, generative learners can create mental simulations of a how a scenario could play out in the future (i.e how a scenario could unfold) and from those envisioned scenarios, choose the best option. Think of a footballer the night before a big game mentally rehearsing how he will kick a penalty if the gets the chance by responding to the expected goalkeeper’s cues and body language. The footballer could create thought experiments for free by imagining how his different actions could create different outcomes and why.
If a learner lacks experiences in order to generate images or meaning from new content they have not experienced first-hand as yet, the generative learner is able to use their imagination to imagine possible scenarios by generating images. By slipping inside the eye of their minds to imagine how situations could possibly play out they become creators. With humans being limited only by their imagination, the generative learner is limitless.