There's a part of me who really hates AI because I took jobs from me and my colleagues. And, I think it will help with certain things, but I hope that humanity has not been replaced by AI.
That being said, ai teeth It's certainly convenient. Over the past few years, I've noticed that I've used some form of AI tool almost every day, since ChatGpt blew us through conversational skills and agent abilities.
Just chat. I like to spurt AI chatbots on new shows that I watch without risking spoilers, but in many cases these AI-driven apps are slowly changing my job and way of life. I'm not trying to let them take over completely yet, but I am also willing to admit that I don't want to give up on AI completely either.
That said, AI was once considered merely a gimmick, but has evolved into something bigger. Here are some of my favorite AI assist apps I actually use on a daily basis.
Adobe Photoshop for Generation Filling
John Martindale/Foundry
When Adobe introduced AI-powered Generated Filling in 2023, it was billed as a way to create masterpieces at a record time by quickly adding and removing elements from images via text prompts. It's all going well and I'm sure people are using it very effectively, but I really only use one of it: Clean up the image.
Every time you write an article like this, you have to grab some images for illustrative purposes. Usually it's a screenshot, but it may contain product shots, stock images, and other specific photos related to what I'm writing. The problem is that there are no images at all that's right What you need.
That's where the production filling comes in and saves the day. Usually, I have to painstakingly cut out bits, cloned areas, use a healing brush over imperfections, expand the image, copy and paste the background, and harvest to a specific aspect ratio. I will explain what I need and do it for me just to have a generative fill.
Want to delete something? Draw a box around it and leave the generated fill prompt blank. Wipe away anything there and blend the gap into the background. The same applies to enlarge the dimensions of an image without stretching, or to hide personal identifiable information behind something more complicated than a simple blur filter.
The generative filling is not perfect – that's good because it means I keep my Photoshop skills sharp, but that's Large scale Timesaver and one of the most effective AI-driven tools of the past few years.
PDFGear for AI Editing and Answers
John Martindale/Foundry
When I discovered PDFGEAR last year, my seemingly life search ended last year. But it's not only a free PDF editor that lets you do everything the big players can do, but it also has a built-in AI assistant that's really useful, such as annotations and signatures.
PDFGEAR has an AI chatbot that can perform a variety of editing tasks with speed and accuracy, making it a useful tool for tuning complex documents without introducing format errors or sacrificing the original aesthetics of document design. You can also annotate, extract data and images, and talk about what's in it.
I especially like it for finding information in the complex board game rulebook. Certainly a good index or glossary can go a long way, but ask natural language questions Twilight Imperium The living rules are much faster than flipping 30 pages of infinite text back and forth. My eyes slide like that like water from the proverb duck's back, but in AI it's quick, easy and accurate.
I'm not alone about this as my colleague reviewed PDFGEAR and found it to be great with robust AI features worth using it!
ProWritingAid for AI proposals
prowritingaid
If you think otherwise, let me break it for you: Professional writers use spell checking. My colleagues and I had been debating whether tools like Grammarly and Prowriteaid were “cheating,” but the ship has been sailing for a long time. Most of these days are predicted, but why? Certainly, my editors can catch all my typos and grammar mistakes, but AI tools can go far beyond that. Prowriteaid makes me a better writer, the era.
To be clear, I don't use ProWritingaid Generate Text for me. Instead, I use it to analyze what I have written and point out all areas where I can improve my writing. I may have been inadvertently using passive voices, or I may be able to reuse the same phrases too often or express the sentences more clearly. It is useful and improves over time due to the persistent presence of these reminders.
Prowriteaid is like the voice on my shoulder. I appreciate it
Microsoft 365 Copilot and Designer
John Martindale/Foundry
Microsoft has been all-in with AI since ChatGpt made its major debut, but despite Bing Search and Windows 11's Copilot integration, they have struggled to find the true purpose of it beyond the basics other AI chatbots offer. That being said, is it one of the areas I found to have legally used on it? Various integrations across Microsoft 365 apps.
I'm a genuinely Libreoffice user, but I enjoy quick text generation for Copilot with Word and Slide Generation in PowerPoint. It's very useful to ask where it's within a large document of hundreds of pages. It saves time when you want to whip a quick draft of your documents and provide a baseline to do your work.
Copilot became really useful recently when I was invited to give a lecture to several classes on how computers work in my children's school. I haven't used PowerPoint in decades so I was able to launch the latest version and allow Copilot and Designer to collaborate and generate simple presentation templates. It literally saved me time.
I like to consider myself a PC expert, but I am not an all app expert. Luckily, you don't need to be with Copilot or Designer.
All other chat gupts
John Martindale/Foundry
ChatGpt has evolved into a catch-all AI tool for me over the past year. Are you having a spoiler-free conversation about the latest episode? retirementUsing it to code your first game project, go back and forth to practice role-playing D&D characters, or even treat them like a virtual counselor, can be a great tool with practical results. I even asked to help me paraphrase my reaction in a discussion with my family, so that it wasn't very militant, and it worked!
In my work life, I use ChatGpt to spit briefs from articles I write and help me hone the structure I'm looking for. I use it as a quick and dirty alternative to thesaurus and use it to find information on the web that Google seems to be unable to see for some reason.
Again, ChatGpt is far from perfect and I don't rely on it for mission-critical tasks, medical diagnosis, financial advice and more.
Read more: I paid $200/month for ChatGpt Pro. Was it worth it?
