You know that totally bogus thing where an investigator on a TV show is able to take a grainy, low-res satellite photo and zoom in so you can see the label on the back of someone's clothing? That thing that anyone with a computer knows is totally fake. Well, a new neural network-based service promises to make that piece of cinematic license a reality. Let's Enhance uses neural networks to interpolate the missing pixels and create clear images when you zoom into a photo.

Artificial intelligence is infiltrating our daily lives, with applications that curate your phone pics, manage your email, and translate text from any language into another. Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are all heavily researching how to integrate AI into their major services. Soon you'll likely interact with an AI (or its output) every time you pick up your phone. Should you trust it? Not always.

Computers believe in conspiracy theories now. The New Inquiry's Francis Tseng trained a bot to recognise patterns in photos and draw links between similar pictures, forming the kind of conspiracy-theory diagram seen in the last act of a Homeland episode or the front page of Reddit. It's a cute trick that reminds us that humans are gullible (hey, maybe those photos do match!), and that the machines we train to think for us could end up just as gullible.

When an app claims to be powered by "artificial intelligence" it feels like you're in the future. What does that really mean, though? We're taking a look at what buzzwords like AI, machine learning and neural networks really mean and whether they actually help improve your apps.