AI is doing some mind-blowing things, from creating ultra-realistic human faces to painting in the style of Van Gogh. But how does it work? Behind these AI-generated masterpieces is a technology called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)—an AI model that literally competes against itself to get better.

Back in the days of analog, if you wanted to watch TV, you had to manually flip through every channel to find something you might like. But now, you have streaming services like Netflix, which now seem to know exactly what movie you’d want to watch next. How does it do that?