The era of Generative AI

About this publication

BIT magazine publishes Dmitry Kotov's analysis of generative AI and what it means for business and technology. The article covers large language models, image generation, and how generative AI is changing content creation, software development, and creative work.

Background

BIT is a Russian professional journal for IT specialists and information-security practitioners. Its readership evaluates a technology by what it does to their threat model, not by what it can generate.

Generative models changed the economics of production, and that is the whole of the disruption. Text, code, images, and speech that used to require a person's hours now require a prompt, which collapses the cost of anything that was expensive only because it was laborious. The consequences run both directions: the same collapse that lets a small team produce at scale lets an attacker produce convincing pretexts, synthetic voices, and personalised phishing at the same scale. Any assessment of the technology that discusses only one of these is describing half of it.