This chapter introduces the basic concepts of artificial intelligence models that can be used to generate high-quality, realistic digital content. The ideas and design principles of the main families of approaches will be discussed and graphically illustrated, including Generative Adversarial Networks, Variational Autoencoders, Autoregressive models, Diffusion techniques, and Multimodal Large Language Models. Particular attention will be devoted to the control that the user can apply to influence the generation since this is of paramount importance in any co-creation process between humans and AI.