| Your definition of "generative" as a statistical term is correct. However, and annoyingly so, recently the general public and some experts have been speaking of "generative AI" (or GenAI for short) when they talk about large language models. This creates the following contradiction: - large language models are called "generative AI" - large language models are based on transformers, which are neural networks - neural networks are discriminative models (not generative ones like Hidden Markov Models) - discriminative models are the oppositve of generative models, mathematically So we may say "Generative AI is based on discriminative (not generative) classifiers and regressors". [as I am also a linguist, I regret this usage came into being, but in linguistics you describe how language is used, not how it should be used in a hypothetical world.] References - Gen AI (Wikipedia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intellig... - Discriminative (Conditional) Model (Wikipedia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discriminative_model |