19 Things People are Trying to Get AI to Do

AI agents’ promise to arrange your finances, do your taxes, book your holidays – and put us all at risk – The Conversation

Coming soon: Ph.D.-level super-agents - Axios

AI could transform health care, but will it live up to the hype? – Science News 

Using AI to talk to animals – Axios  

The Firm That Wants to Power AI With Southern Yellow Pine – Wall Street Journal

Twelve Labs is building AI that can analyze and search through videos – TechCrunch 

Samsung has developed an audio eraser feature for smartphones that will allow users to erase unwanted sounds from videos – Data Country 

Extreme Weather Is Taxing Utilities More Often. Can A.I. Help? – New York Times  

Are AI-created recipes hard to swallow? – BBC

The world-changing ‘killer app’ for AI could be nuclear fusion - Washington Post  

OpenAI starts testing prototype of new AI search tool - Axios

OpenAI working on new reasoning technology under code name ‘Strawberry’ – Reuters

How AI could transform baseball forever – Washington Post

How generative AI could reinvent what it means to play – MIT Tech Review

Communicate with animals, win millions: Inside the wild new world of AI prizes – Semafor

Can AI make better chocolate chip cookie recipes than humans? We taste tested 2 – NPR

Can AI police itself? Experts say chatbots can detect each other’s gaffes. – Washington Post

Digital Twins and AI in Next-Gen Nuclear Reactor Operations  - AI wire

Five Ways AI Will Break Software Development – Inside AI News

It's Not

It's not what we eat but what we digest that makes us strong; not what we gain but what we save that makes us rich; not what we read but what we remember that makes us learned; and not what we profess but what we practice that gives us integrity. - Frances Bacon (born Jan. 22, 1561)

AI Dementia

Researchers have discovered that some of the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems might be experiencing their own version of cognitive decline. A new study finds that leading AI chatbots, including ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, performed poorly on the same cognitive tests used to screen elderly patients for dementia. -Study Finds

24 Articles about the Business of Running an AI Company

Amazon AI deal leaves ‘zombie’ start-up in its wake, whistleblower says – Washington Post

Coming soon: Ph.D.-level super-agents - Axios

Google’s Resolution for 2025: Catch Up to ChatGPT – Wall Street Journal

China's AI keeps getting better — and cheaper – Axios

Joe Biden signs executive order to speed AI data center construction – The Verge

Google is forming a new team to build AI that can simulate the physical world – Tech Crunch

Nvidia sends less powerful AI chips to China – Tom’s Hardware

OpenAI, Google and Runway race to generate AI video – Axios

AI-powered avatars can gesture naturally as they speak – New Scientist

OpenAI says it needs ‘more capital than we’d imagined’ as it lays out for-profit plan - CNBC

Microsoft Is Forcing Its AI Assistant on People—and Making Them Pay - Wall Street Journal

Nonprofit group joins Elon Musk’s effort to block OpenAI’s for-profit transition – Tech Crunch   

Tech dollars flood into AI data centers - Axios

Don’t Look Now, but China’s AI Is Catching Up Fast - Wall Street Journal 

OpenAI Unveils New A.I. That Can ‘Reason’ Through Math and Science Problems – New York Times

Google DeepMind unveils a new video model to rival Sora - TechCrunch  

Your Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses just got a massive AI upgrade – ZDnet  

The year in AI: Catch up on the top AI news of 2024 – Tech Target

Mobile pioneers say they’ll make ‘agentic AI’ a reality with new platform – Semafor  

OpenAI launched a 1-800-ChatGPT hotline, allowing users to interact with its chatbot over the phone - CNN

OpenAI says it has no plans to release an API for Sora - TechCrunch

Databricks co-founder offers $1 million prize to solve AI coding problems – Semafor

Sam Altman on ChatGPT’s First Two Years, Elon Musk and AI Under Trump – Bloomberg  

Google introduces a new quantum computing chip called Willow, designed to be faster and more reliable than previous chips – Tech Crunch

Why We Lie

A life of total dedication to the truth means.. a life of total honesty. It means a continuous and never-ending process of self-monitoring to assure that our communications – not only the words that we say but also the way we say them-invariably reflect as accurately as humanly possible the truth or reality as we know it. Such honesty does not come painlessly. The reason people lie is to avoid the pain of challenge and its consequences.  

M Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Darkness & Light

Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

No one we can safely ignore

If we want to welcome God into our lives, there is no one we can safely ignore.

Your Talents

Hide not your talents, they for use were made. What's a sun-dial in the shade? -Benjamin Franklin (born Jan. 17, 1706)

False Starts

It is important to distinguish between a real new beginning in someone’s life and a simple defensive reaction to an ending. Each may exert strain on a relationship, but the new beginning must be honored. The defensive reaction is simply a new way of perpetuating the old situation and needs to be considered as such.

Unfortunately, there is no psychological test you can take at such times. It is often difficult to be sure whether some path leads forward or back, and it may be necessary to follow it for a little way to be sure. But there are two signs that are worth looking for before you start. The first is the reaction of people who know you well: not whether they approve or disapprove, but whether they see what you propose to do as something new or simply a replay of an old pattern. The second indication comes from the transition process itself: Have you really moved through endings into the neutral zone and found there the beginning you now want to follow is this “beginning” a way of avoiding an ending or aborting the neutral zone experience?

William Bridges, Transitions

13 Ways to Spot AI Writing

Tips for determining if an article is likely written by AI.

OVERUSED WORDS. AI-written articles tend to come back to the same terms multiple times. Examples would be comprehensive, delve, meticulous, versatile and pivotal. Before 2024, overused AI words in scientific research papers were typically nouns. More recently, researchers say AI excessively uses "style" words—mostly verbs and some adjectives. The phrases AI picks up can often make the text sound more like marketing material than academic scholarship or quality news writing.

TORTURED ACRONYMS. Generative AI will sometimes pick up the wrong words for an acronym. For instance, a data science paper might use "CNN" to refer to "convolutional brain organization" instead of "convolutional neural network.”

NONSENSICAL PARAPHRASES. An academic paper written by AI might have “glucose bigotry” instead of “glucose intolerance,” where it changed a single word and did not recognize the context.  

ACADEMIC CITATIONS. AI-written articles with academic citations have been known to include incorrect or incomplete references. AI writing has been also known to take quotations out of quotation marks, paraphrase them, and delete the citation.

STYLE CHANGES. A sudden change in writing style within an article or essay may indicate that the author’s work was rewritten using AI.

PERFECT GRAMMAR. A typo, particularly in student writing, could indicate the article or essay is not wholly the work of a bot. Mistake-free writing is, ironically, a red flag. However, savvy writing prompts may ask the AI to include some errors in order to mislead inspectors.

MECHANICAL STYLING. AI tends to mechanically repeat expressions that appear often in the internet material that it was trained on. The result is often uninspired and generic prose that often lacks any specific point. 

ARTICLES. AI will make errors in the use of definite and indefinite articles, often because it does not recognize the context to determine whether an article is required and which one. For example, AI editors will often fail to use the definite article before common nouns such as “participants” and “results” when referring to a study.  “Results show that…” is a general reference while “The results show that…” are those of the present study. Generative AI will miss this distinction.

SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT. AI often fumbles subject-verb agreement when the verb does not immediately proceed the verb. 

VERB TENSE. Generative AI will confuse when to use past tense and present tense.

LINKING WORDS. AI editors tend to delete words linking sentences and paragraphs, such as “however,” “therefore,” “in contrast,” and “moreover.”

ARCHAIC LANGUAGE. Since older texts from the early twentieth have been more available to use as training data sets for LLMs than current writing samples, some researchers have found overuse of words that were popular then but have since fallen out of common usage as evidence of generative AI.  

PREDICTABILITY. Text is more likely to be human than AI when it includes sarcasm, current pop-references or insults the reader. Writing that doesn't match predictable patterns is more likely to be human generated.

 More about spotting fake news

Taking Action

It doesn’t matter if you have a genius IQ and a PhD in quantum physics, you can’t change anything or make any sort of real-world progress without taking action. There’s a huge difference between knowing how to do something and actually doing it. Knowledge and intelligence are both useless without action. It’s as simple as that.

Successful people know that a good plan executed today is better than a perfect plan executed someday. They don’t wait for the “right time” or the “right day” or the “right (impossible) circumstances”, because they know these reactions are based on a fear and nothing more. They take action here and now, today – because that’s where real progress happens.

Angel Chernoff

AI Hallucinations "can be remarkably useful"

Innovators are finding that A.I. hallucinations can be remarkably useful. “The public thinks it’s all bad,” said Amy McGovern, a computer scientist who directs a federal A.I. institute. “But it’s actually giving scientists new ideas. It’s giving them the chance to explore ideas they might not have thought about otherwise.” A.I. hallucinations are reinvigorating the creative side of science. They speed the process by which scientists and inventors dream up new ideas and test them to see if reality concurs.

-William Broad writing in the New York Times

The Common Mistake in Premarital Counseling

The failure of premarital counseling to affect the divorce rate today may be due primarily to the fact that the approach is often directed toward the couple's relationship. The focus on personality, psychodynamics, and transactions has deprived couples of a more enriching perspective from which to evaluate their problems and their future. By switching the focus to the bride and groom's families of origin, not only can premarital counseling be made more effective in its own right, but the very experience also becomes an opportunity to affect more than one couple and far more than one generation.

Edwin Friedman, Generation to Generation

One Mile, 20 Times

Asked by a weekend jogger how on earth he had the energy and stamina to run twenty miles, the long-distance runner smiled and said, “Good heavens. I couldn’t possibly get going if I thought about running twenty miles. I run one mile—but I do it twenty times.”

Herbert and Jill Meyer, How to Write

The Chance of Joy

If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. –Ursula Le Guin

Humor Enters

Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle. -GK Chesterton

The Top 8 AI Video Tools

Adobe Firefly

An all-in-one solution for video production, Adobe’s AI-driven multimedia production tool is easy to use. It can do AI video editing, 3D modeling, text-to-image and text-to-video generation, photo editing, AI-enhanced scene transitions, auto-resizing and color correction. Of course, it has a smooth integration with Adobe Creative Cloud. Because it was trained on Adobe Stock images, there are no copyright issues. All the generated images safe for commercial use. The downside: it doesn’t do well with complex queries. Free version provides 25 monthly generative credits or $4.99 a month.

Captions AI

An AI phone app for video editing that adds captions including a feature to automatically transform your voice into any of 27 languages. Easy to use. Includes a teleprompter, an AI script-writing assistant, and a suite of AI editing features.  

Descript 

Edit a video or audio file as you would a Google Doc. You can delete words to edit out sections of your video or audio. Add transitions, titles, and music. Can remove background noise and filler words. Cannot edit a video using natural language.   

Eddie AI

Users can edit interview videos with natural language . Explain what you want in your own words. Cannot be used to add transitions, titles, or special effects. Free (but not for long). Basic explanation of how it works here. 

Hypernatural

Make short videos of text, audio, a link, etc. with AI. No editing skills needed. The results are less generic than other AI-video makers, partly because the user makes stylistic choices along the way, narration, color palette, transitions, video orientation, or use your own photos. Make 10 free 30 second videos (no longer) and after than paid accounts start at $12 a month.

Ideogram

An excellent AI image and video generator. A paid account isn’t needed to get quality images, this one is easier to use for beginners than tools like Midjourney. It has a simple to use interface. Text in the images comes out more readable than most AI image creators, which is important for social media graphics, thumbnails, logos, etc. Ten credits a day free (about 5 images). Free users can only download a 70% quality JPEG image, not the full-resolution version. Images are public when using the free version. Paid accounts starts at $7 monthly for more images and quicker rendering than the free version along with advanced features like Canvas, which lets you modify images. Paid accounts can use negative prompts (what you don’t want in the image).

Invideo.io

Video editing tool that works in a Chrome browser, Plenty of templates and tools. Can take a while to upload media to it. Users can edit particular scenes. The free plan allows 10 minutes of video and 4 exports a week. Some user reviews have been negative about hidden fees and other issues with paid accounts.  

Sora

OpenAI's AI high-quality video generator with watermarks. Similar to other video editing tools with frame views on the bottom and various editing tools. Available to ChatGPT Plus users (50 videos a month) and ChatGPT Pro users (10 times more usage).

Other text to video creators

Hotshot.co – 5 free generations per day.

LumaDreamMachine – 30 free generations per month.

Kling AI – 6 free generations per day.

Runway – 125 free one-time credits. Paid accounts starting at $12 per month

Ideogram.ai – 40 generations per day free, paid plans start at $8

Hailuoai.video

PixVerse – free

Pika.art - 250 initial free credits and then 30 daily credits. Paid accounts from $8 to $58 per month

Kaiber – limited and typically used to create animations and transform existing videos into different styles. 60 free credits as part of a trial.

More AI Tools

Spending our Lives

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. -Annie Dillard

Showing AI skills in your job search

Given the emerging and quickly developing nature of AI tools, it can be tricky to display your expertise in a particular skill as a job candidate. Job applicants can build up their AI skills and stand out from the competition in three key ways:

Stay on top of developments. Find online resources and sign up to email lists to read about the latest trends and developments. The technology is moving so fast, the challenge is staying up to date. It is important to try  and build a fundamental knowledge of what’s going on behind the scenes with AI news.

Use AI in your own work. Seek out opportunities in your work to try and use these tools. That’s when you really start to understand the strengths and weaknesses and can learn to write smart prompts to get the best application out of them.   

Show how you’ve used AI successfully to achieve a specific goal. Indicate that you’ve added commercial value to your organization by using it. 

Adopted from a CNBC article by Jennifer Liu

The Top 8 AI Image Creation Tools

Adobe Firefly

An all-in-one AI solution for video and photo production from the people who brought you. Easy to use, it can do AI video editing, 3D modeling, text-to-image and text-to-video generation, photo editing, AI-enhanced scene transitions, auto-resizing and color correction. Of course, it has a smooth integration with Adobe Creative Cloud. Because it was trained on Adobe Stock images, there are no copyright issues. All the generated images safe for commercial use. The downside: it doesn’t do well with complex queries and is not consistent when generating text within images. Free version provides 25 monthly generative credits or $4.99 a month.

Bing AI Image Creator

This feature in Microsoft’s search engine Bing is powered by OpenAI’s DALL-E. It allows users to generate realistic and creative images from text prompts. Free but with a limit of 25 images each day.

Canva

The graphic design platform has integrated generative AI into all its products including: image, and text creation, photos, audio, and video editing. Use Canvas drag-and-drop to create social media graphics, headers, slides, flyers, photo collages, posters, infographics, even mind maps for concepts. Share to social media straight from the app or download for posting. Limited editing tools so it’s more for beginners. Free. $12 a month gets you more options.

DALL-E

OpenAI’s tool that turns written text into images using AI. Named after painter Salvador Dali and Disney Pixar’s WALL-E. Understands long, complex queries. Includes a helpful edit feature. Select an area of a generated image and prompt it to change that part. However, not as reliable at generating accurate text than Ideogram or Flux. A limited number of images are free. $20 per month for ChatGPT Plus.

Ideogram

An excellent AI image and video generator. A paid account isn’t needed to get quality images, this one is easier to use for beginners than tools like Midjourney. It has a simple to use interface. Text in the images comes out more readable than most AI image creators, which is important for social media graphics, thumbnails, logos, etc. Ten credits a day free (about 5 images). Free users can only download a 70% quality JPEG image, not the full-resolution version. Images are public when using the free version. Paid accounts starts at $7 monthly for more images and quicker rendering than the free version along with advanced features like Canvas, which lets you modify images. Paid accounts can use negative prompts (what you don’t want in the image).

Microsoft Designer's Image Creator

One of the best image creators, it is powered by DALL-E 3. Accessible in the same place that you access Microsoft's AI chatbot Copilot. Free (though you must create a Microsoft account).

MidJourney

One of the best AI image generators, it uses machine learning to create high-quality pictures based on text. The interface has been improved since it first launched. There is a limited free version but paying the monthly cost will avoid annoying ads. You’ll find a good prompt book here and a guide to get started here.

Stability AI's DreamStudio

A more accessible version of Stable Diffusion, which requires some technical skills. Users can create images through AI with many customizations, such as telling it what to avoid. An account must be created sign in with Google or Discord accounts. $1 for 100 credits, one image costs two credits.

Others worth Considering 

Leonardo.AI

Originally meant to help folks create gaming assets, it produces impressive and clear images. Useful but limited editing tools. There’s no post-editing on the free plan and the privacy plan is weak. Free plan allows up to 150 images each day.

Flux AI

Use this AI image generation tool for free through HuggingFace or Freepik. It creates gorgeous images and doesn’t require any special prompting lingo.

Whisk

Google’s new AI tool Whisk uses image prompts instead of text. Input a collection of images without a prompt and choose a style to generate a new image. Unlike traditional AI image generators, which allow users to specify exactly what they want, Whisk enables users to experiment and draw inspiration without the constraints of text inputs. Users can tweak the final image. Intended as a fun AI feature, rather than a refined professional work tool.

 More AI Tools