Half my email and Tiktok feed are tech gurus screaming about a new “mind-blowing” AI tool. As a GenZ, content creator and recent graduate who considers themselves pretty up-to-date on a lot of the new tech that's hot and new, even I’ve had a hard time keeping up with remembering and trying out all of them lately. It feels like every day there’s a brand-new AI tool that’s surfacing everyone’s attention. But just like all things and hype bandwagons, there will eventually be repeat offenders and a few AI tools that will gradually become used by even the normies.
The more I’ve been using AI tools these past couple of months (since the explosion of ChatGPT), the more my brain has started to recognize which ones I’m using every day. And hopefully, if you’re confused about which ones are worth the hype of trying out or not, maybe this will help you out.
AI Tools I use…
Every day. Multiple Times a day even
- Chat GPT- When I realized how often I use ChatGPT after looking at my chat log, I was honestly surprised. I’ve been using it since January 2023, and so far I’ve had a total of 92 separate convos in 6 months, averaging 15 different convos or “topics” a month. I didn't think I’d use it for everything, but I actually do use it for literally everything. A lot of it was helping me understand school subjects back when I was still a senior at Rutgers. But now I use it for far more- from asking it to plan and budget a trip, summarizing a popular book or concept, asking for advice on my content, ideas for art, etc. I use it a lot as a sounding board for my ideas and creativity. When I was planning my coffee omakase event, I turned to ChatGPT for some funky drink ideas when one of my coffee options didn’t work out. The 3 Tabs I always have open no matter what are: my Gmail, Google Calendar, and Notion. I’ll now have to add ChatGPT to the list.
- Google Bard- This one came out of the blue, and honestly, it's mostly Google’s doing than my own. Ever since getting access to the Search Labs, I wasn’t proactively learning how to use it but I simply got used to using it. This may be a flawed result since the result is in your face right under the nose of the search bar (and who doesn’t use Google every day), but hey, it gets the job done. The times it's been useful was when I was trying to find a “factually correct” answer or method (cough cough, unlike ChatGPT at times). It’s been especially useful when I had very specific questions about my credit cards and transferring points or when I wanted to know if my suspicious cough was a symptom of something much worse. It was like it took the average of all the answers online and crunched it into an easy-to-read consensus.
Often. Like once a week
- Dalle 2- I feel like I’m psychologically primed to support OpenAI because I met them last year at a startup conference and had no idea they would be “the one” to blow up and kindle all the AI hype. Dalle 2 is definitely my favorite image generator up until now and whenever I have a new AI image generator, I always compare it to Dalle’s performance. Rather than using it for practical purposes, I use Dalle more “for fun” when I think of things on a whim, which is quite often. I love how easy and simple the UI is for Dalle, which is honestly the reason I find myself reaching for them first.
- Midjourney- The one I use for practicality. Their renders are a lot more realistic and advanced in my opinion. I go to Midjourney when I need a realistic image and for AI art competitions (like this one where I won second place!). I only started using Midjourney recently though, and it took me a while because I was confused on how to set it up. To the normies who have never used Discord, I wish them the best of luck if they dare to try Midjourney as a non-discord user. Even then, setting up your own discord server just to use Midjourey requires an extra step. And because of all that, I would say it definitely took some getting used to with the “/” commands. However, once I got my own server for the sole purpose of using Midjourney, I found myself using it a lot more often.
Once a Month
- Notion AI- I don’t use Notion AI as much as I expected myself to, because Notion is practically my second brain and I visit it at least 40 times a day; so considering how often I use notion I’m surprised I don’t use Notion AI more. The reason I don’t use it often is because I don’t exactly know how to best use it. Also, I don’t like how pressing the spacebar is how to trigger the AI tool which sometimes makes my Notion bug out, so I’ve found myself trying to even avoid triggering the space button at all. However, I have used it to change the tone of my content, like an email.
- Playbook AI- Has Stable Diffusion and Dall E built into it which is cool! I recently did a Playbook AI Art Competition so getting used to Playbook’s features using the built-in AI image generators was a breeze. It also lets you save your prompts which is super helpful for future references.
- Photoshop’s Generative Fill- I used it for the first time last week, actually! I tried to give myself clothes, but unfortunately, clothes are Photoshop’s Generative weakness. Its AI-generated reflective water, landscapes, and buildings are amazing but I don’t see myself using Photoshop as often because it takes up a lot of space and it’s simply not as good yet. If I can use it to generate realistic and good clothes, I’ll definitely use it more in the future.
Haven’t tried but Want to give it a shot
- CopyAI- I’ve heard a lot of hype about this one, but I’m not sure how it would best fulfill my needs unless I am a marketer or copywriter at a company. I’d be open to seeing how to best use it though!
- LexAI- Also for copywriting
- AgentGPT- super excited to try this one, does a bunch of other tasks on its own
