Generative AI: A systematic review using topic modelling techniques

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is a rapidly growing field with a wide range of applications. In this paper, a thorough examination of the research landscape in GAI is presented, encompassing a comprehensive overview of the prevailing themes and topics within the field. The study analyzes a corpus of 1319 records from Scopus spanning from 1985 to 2023 and comprises journal articles, books, book chapters, conference papers, and selected working papers. The analysis revealed seven distinct clusters of topics in GAI research: image processing and content analysis, content generation, emerging use cases, engineering, cognitive inference and planning, data privacy and security, and Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) academic applications. The paper discusses the findings of the analysis and identifies some of the key challenges and opportunities in GAI research. The paper concludes by calling for further research in GAI, particularly in the areas of explainability, robustness, cross-modal and multi-modal generation, and interactive co-creation. The paper also highlights the importance of addressing the challenges of data privacy and security in GAI and responsible use of GAI. © 2024 The Authors