My Adventures in AI

We have come a long way from HAL 9000 and R2D2. Today, AI is powering everything from photo editing to music composition. But which platforms are best suited for creative industries? As a creative, AI fascinates and scares me in equal measure. That creative output can be produced in minutes whereas the human mind takes longer has prompted a conversation around the possibility of us being replaced, is mildly unsettling to put it mildly.

The only way to figure this out was to try out as many AI options out there. Et voila! Here are some which have not started doing the rounds just yet.

Jasper.I is an AI platform built to help content creators and marketers. In just a few clicks, Jasper can generate blog posts, social media captions, product descriptions and more, helping you to write better content. Just type in your topic and it spits out article ideas, headlines and key points to get you started. Great for brainstorming new concepts. But no, it won’t write the concept for you!

Fireflies AI is an AI writing assistant aimed at creative writers. The platform helps generate story ideas, character descriptions and plot points. While the writing still needs human finesse, Fireflies provides a foundation and inspiration to get the creative juices flowing, to ‘fill in the blanks’ per se. The lack of personalisation is bothersome, and at the end of the day, only a human can do that.

Tripnotes uses AI to generate travel stories from your photos. Simply upload photos from a trip and Tripnotes will automatically identify locations, generate captions and piece together a narrative travelogue. The results are surprisingly fun and evocative. A fun way to remember your trips.

Memecam is a smartphone app that turns you into a meme in real-time using AI image recognition. Just open the app, it detects your face and overlays hilarious meme templates on you. The memes are instantly shareable, making it perfect for some light-hearted fun. Great for social content if you want a lighter vibe. Like Tripnotes, this is a useful tool for content creators.

Durable is an AI writing tool focused on helping businesses tell their brand story in an authentic and human voice. At least that is what it says. It is, in fact, an AI writing partner that helps you generate, organise, and refine your ideas. You can use it as a starter for novels, essays, speeches, and more. Might be a good long-term creative collaborator of sorts. But no, it won’t do your work for you. Your brain will still need to be put to work.

Gamma’s text-to-image AI is impressive. In under 80 words, it promises to create surprisingly realistic images, graphics and text within a few clicks. In reality, the results are hit-or-miss and often nonsensical. Pass.

Stylized AI is an image generation tool that lets you apply different art styles to your photos. Fun to experiment with, letting you transform any photo into a painting in the style of Van Gogh, Monet and others. Fun to play with but limited in its creative applications and the images often lack finesse.

Thumbly AI’s writing assistant is pretty basic. It’s best used as a brainstorming tool to spark new ideas, not create full texts. It’s snappy and can help generate basic copy for short blogs or ideas for stories. But the writing feels stilted and unnatural, again a recurring issue with many writing assistants, often struggling with longer, more complex pieces.

Rationale (Jina.AI) helps data scientists build and deploy AI solutions. Their search and data mining tools for images, text and audio show real promise for creative pros. But the learning curve is steep and pricing opaque.

Beautiful AI generates unique images from text prompts using AI models they train. The images have a dreamlike, surreal quality that could inspire creative projects. It’s simple and easy to use and can also produce short texts. Worth a try for basic content.

Brandmark creates logos and branding materials and is good for small businesses or start-ups which do not have the resources to hire professionals (please note key word here). It uses machine learning algorithms to analyse the industry the company is in and creates branding material accordingly, with the option to customise. Much more affordable than hiring a designer but may not be able to give you that extra oomph in a design that a conversation with a designer might result in.

Synthesia.io is an AI- powered video creator. Great for marketers or content creators who need to make video content quickly. Allows for customisable graphics and animations and purports to create realistic videos of people speaking for voice/video messages or product videos. I didn’t try it out so will take their word for it. Steep pricing though.

Simplified is designed for copywriting and content creation. Plug in a topic or idea and receive generated content. While it does create good, engaging copy it tends to be generic and again as is the case with all the AI tools so far, be it visual or the written word, needs editing and rewriting to make it truly unique.

Kickresume AI is probably the one AI tool which can be used with great efficiency. It analyses your career history and creates a custom resume that is tailored to your skills and experience. Good for job seekers who need to stand out. The downside is that it can be limited in terms of design and doesn’t allow for much customisation.

How helpful the above is, I don’t know, since all of these are constantly changing and evolving, shifting focus from one benefit to the other. By the time this goes to press, some of the observations might not apply at all. Who knows?

If you want to use an AI tool to improve your resume, understand complex texts in simple bullet points, or use it in a personal capacity for your own social media content, go ahead and play, explore and experiment. But if you are planning to use it for creativity, then it’s clear that as of this moment at least, AI cannot create a unique narrative in terms of visuals and words. And the mere fact is that whatever is generated is based on work that is already out there has the uneasy scent of plagiarism. So not surprisingly, there are agencies which have banned the use of AI for any and all creative output.

Take heart in knowing that the human brain is a magnificent machine, that it is capable of producing ideas and thoughts that a machine cannot. And while imperfect, it creates what is perfect for us.

Rashna Abdi is CEO, Vitamin C.
rashna@vitamincdigital.com