First, I wrote this entire article myself — no help from AI. Of course, you’d expect that from someone compensated for his writing skills (for now). What about everyone else? Not everyone finds writing easy (I certainly don’t). There are times when I stare at the blinking cursor wishing the copy would flow only to find myself raging through another bout of writer’s block. Fortunately for you, this isn’t one of those days.
Ever since AI took the world by storm earlier this year, we’ve all struggled to understand how it’s going to impact our lives. I started playing around with these tools in late 2022 and it’s taken me a while to wrap my head around how AI can help us do a better job running our businesses. Unlike the poor sods toiling away for the Reeks & Wrecks in Vonnegut’s dystopian book Player Piano, the machines aren’t putting us all out of work (yet). In the meantime, you can argue with progress the way the buggy whip manufacturer did during the early days of the automobile or you can be proactive and get educated. Your competitor across town is calcified, routinized, and not as open to new ideas as they used to be. What about you? In case you wanted a few pointers, here are five tools I’ve found tremendously useful this year:
1. ChatGPT
This one’s probably obvious at this point, but in case you’ve been living under a rock since late 2022, there’s now a tool that has answers (some are even correct!) to any question you can think up. Need a blog, email subject line, witty haiku, or marketing flier? ChatGPT to the rescue. Will writing become one of those quaint skills people used to practice? No matter where you sit on the luddite vs. early adopter spectrum, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Bard, and LLaMa are here to stay. It’s still so early. We don’t even have voice assistants (with the exception of Josh.ai’s JoshGPT) properly connected to any LLMs. What’s it going to be like when Siri and Alexa are empowered with HAL 9000-esque intelligence?
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Do yourself a favor. Splurge on the budget-priced GPT-4 subscription ($20 monthly). It’s lightyears beyond the free version. If we’re operating in a world aimed at saving our clients’ time, we should be as selfish with it as they are. OpenAI’s premium version opens the door to third-party integrations needed to make some of the tools below function properly.
2-5. ChatGPT Plug-Ins
Photorealistic — With LLMs, it’s all about the prompts. While you might enjoy the first few parlor trick articles, sonnets, and images, when it comes time to get serious, you’ll need a tool like Photorealistic to create a prompt that can be fed to picture generators like Midjourney. Check out this example of taking a layman’s request and turning it into prompt gold:
Midjourney — AI image bot Midjourney is creating amazing images from well-scripted prompts. In the same vein as OpenAI’s DALL-E, Midjourney needs your imagination to work. Need a graphic for a company newsletter, all-hands email, or customer email campaign? Let Midjourney do the work. It’s a bit of a pain to set up. You’ll need a Discord account (your kids are probably already using it) and an active Midjourney subscription. Once everything is configured, you ask Midjourney’s image bot to serve up fresh pics inside of Discord. Sounds a little confusing, right? It is, but it’s worth the hassle once everything is set up properly. Check out this tutorial detailing how to configure the whole shooting match.
Here are two images side by side below. You can see the difference the right prompts (courtesy of Photorealistic) make:
Layman’s prompt:
Photorealistic Prompt:
Chatbase — How would you like your own Chatbot? Chatbase to the rescue! After signing up for an account, you can feed it whatever you want. I loaded in our employee handbook and website. Here’s a screenshot showing how my new chatbot handles simple inquiries:
Pictory — If you want an easy way to make videos from any article, blog, or just load in a script yourself, consider Pictory. I loaded in one of my recent product reviews and let the wizard run. The raw output needs work, but nothing that 15 minutes of editing couldn’t fix. If the future of marketing is video, AI tools like Pictory will become increasingly common. Here’s a screenshot of my new video (created in 45 seconds):
I get it, you’ve got a million plates spinning in the air and the last thing you have time for is screwing around with AI. That said, it’s all coming at us fast and there will be those who innovate and those who argue. Which one will you be?
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Stay frosty, and see you in the field.
