Left and right: Artwork made by GANs with dreamgenerator.com, the middle photo being the original by Travis Colbert on Unsplash

What is a GAN?

How a weird idea became the foundation of cutting-edge AI

Take any course on machine learning and you’ll invariably encounter Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs. Understanding them means mastering the surprising power of playing a computer out against itself.

It’s around five o’clock and you’ve just finished your homework.