> if it isn't very new science

it's pretty new "science." at least last 8 years or so

I'm pretty sure I remember it being talked about on the tv show 'beyond 2000' in the 90s

generative AI?

It’s at least 40 years old. Think Gibbs sampling was invented the 1980s

Gibbs sampling is not generative AI. Really, generative AI is not at all a well defined term.

It is, unfortunately, not the same thing as a generative model.

What’s generative AI?

A buzzword - generally I would say it refers to using unsupervised training of some neural network model and then generating new data in the domain from the model.

I believe it originally grew out of the phrase "generative model" (which models the joint data probability distribution) but most of the prominent 'generative AI' models (like GPT) are not actually generative models but discriminators.

Regardless, outside of simple things like matrix multiplication, the theory of backpropagation (although not the implementations), language modeling as a concept, etc. - almost all of these techniques are within the last decade and a half or so.

Let us not forget history. Generative AI (informally defined as "algorithmic generation of stuff" for the sake of argument) has been around for more than 40 years. For example,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_art?wprov=sfla1

And of course, other forms of generative AI exist.

Sure, if we define "Generative AI" as "algorithmic generation of stuff" then it has been around for a long time.

I disagree that this is what people are really referring to when they use the phrase generative AI and basically none of the techniques being used can really be said to be 40 years old.