9 incredibly useful AI resources
that are not ChatGPT * UPDATE: This post is now free *
This post was originally for paid subscribers only, who received it a day and a half ago
Greetings!
I’ve been putting several free (up to a point) AI tools through their paces. They cover image creation and research — both ideal resources for writers. I think this post has taken me over four hours to research, so I hope you find it useful, otherwise I’ll cry.
Let’s dive in.
Ideogram
Put in a prompt, and then select the styles you want to apply. If you like the result but it’s not quite what you’re after, you can remix it, applying more styles or different ones. That’s what I did with the pix below, the one on the left being the original result.
See art
This produces great images, but seems to have a mind of its own. I prompted it to draw a picture of a teacher in the form of a superhero, and it came up with a couple that seemed to be based on the image of Supergirl. So I asked it again, specifying it had to be male. Here are a couple of the results, first attempt and second attempt:
I’m not that impressed to be honest. The images are of photographic quality, but neither the girl nor the man looks like a teacher. And look at the blackboards: they haven’t been in classrooms in most schools for at least 30 years.
Mind you, my first attempt was asking See Art to draw a school inspector in the style of Monet. Here are the results:
Again, neither of these people look like a school inspector. The only Monet-ish aspect, almost, is the water in the second one, who by the way looks more like a schoolgirl than a school inspector. Also, the first woman is cross-eyed.
Now, I have to admit that I didn’t spend much time on the prompts, and what these results prove to me is that you have be very specific about what you want. You also need to keep on refining it.
Bing image creator
This uses Dall-e, which is now available only to paying subscribers to ChatGPT. You’ll need a Microsoft Office account to use it, but the results aren’t bad. Mind you, they’re not fantastic either. I asked it to draw a picture of a classroom with engaged kids and teacher in the style of Roy Lichtenstein, and it came up with four pictures. Here’s one of them:
Much as I think that’s a nice image, there’s nothing of Lichtenstein in it, unless you count the bright colours. And even then, Lichtenstein used primary colours.
On the other hand, I asked it to draw faces that looked like photos:
Not bad, eh?
Animated drawings
This one turns a still drawing or photo into an animated one. My first go was done using a drawing of a cat:
This was the result:
So much for not reading instructions, because it’s turned into a cat doing a version of backstroke! My next effort was rather more successful I think. I used this photo:
And here’s the animated version:
Playground
This was the result of a prompt for a drawing of a schoolteacher by Roy Litchtenstein. The drawing is OK, but doesn’t fulfill the brief.
I’ve tried other prompts with similar results, that is interesting pictures that didn’t meet the requirements. Still, there are various visual prompts to select from. I tried a very sf one, and this is what was created for me:
I think, therefore, that Playground probably works best as a way of generating illustrations that can compliment a story or stimulate one’s imagination.
Leiapix
This is a program that can transform a still image into a 3d animated one. I tried it on this:
and got this:
I’m not terribly impressed, to be honest, but play around with it yourself. I think it probably does brilliant things with photos or drawings that are pretty dynamic to start with.
Better images of AI
This is a website with free AI-generated images that purport to be different from the usual clichés. I have to say that the ones I’ve seen so far are pretty good, such as this one denoting word taxonomy:
There’s an explanation of this image, and what it was created with, here.
The pictures on the site are free to use as long as you do so within the terms specified. At the moment there aren’t very many on the site, and there’s no search button, but I guess it’s early days.
Perplexity
This is an alternative to ChatGPT. It’s not bad at all, not least because it can search the web. I said to it: tell me about the UK writer Terry Freedman, and here’s what it came up with:
One of the videos it came up with had nothing to do with me, but apart from that I’m rather impressed.
SciSpace
This is like ChatGPT but concerned only with searching scientific PDFs and websites. It interprets “scientific” more broadly than you might imagine. I asked it to conduct a literature review of Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. While it served up a few irrelevant results about winter nights, it also gave me several learned papers about the book. Moreover, you can ask it to summarise the paper for you and draw out its key points. You can upload PDFs to it as well. There’s a handy Chrome browser extension too, so you can have this resource at your fingertips.
If you enjoyed this deep dive and found it useful, you may also like others on this website, such as:
25 websites for free illustrations
Introduction Need a picture to illustrate your article? Well, you can just look through Google Images and use any that take your fancy, right? Wrong! Being viewable on Google does not necessarily equal free to use. And sometimes it’s hard to discern who owns the copyright, and what the terms of use are.
How to enter text quickly
In this article I discuss the ways I manage to get articles written so quickly, at least some of the time.
How I didn't write one of my books
You may recognise my allusion to Calvino’s How I Wrote One Of My Books. Within an archive, latterly digitised, are my notes, drawings and printouts for a book about a particular area of education. I knew that that sort of volume I had in mind would be unlikely to make the Sunday Times bestseller shortlist, and anyone in education would not have been mistaken had they declared that there are already more books on the subject that we probably need. However, my book was going to be aimed at a very niche audience, and would have benefitted from the following:
How to write short
Writing short has several benefits. For the reader it means just a small investment in time to derive pleasure or obtain information. For the writer it means stretching one's ability to the limit. One of the magazines I write for sets a limit of 150 words for book reviews. That doesn't leave room for nuance or beating about the bush. In this article I'll go into how I go about it.
I’m definitely ‘getting my money’s worth’ on this post. I’ve just finished rereading it for a third time. Very interesting though as usual some bits of AI-generated work are hilarious and some are definitely disturbing. Thanks so much for doing the legwork for us. It’s appreciated.
OMG….!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank you for your time Professor Freedman. A fascinating collection of… stuff. I can certainly see which software versions I WON’T be using! I started off cackling, then got horrified, then … well, a real roller coaster of emotions anyway. The forehead hat brim! The weird hands and eyes (I’m amazed how good some of your results actually were!)
I’m always terrified of seeing myself in one of these created beings. Now that you’ve fed yourself into the machinery you may well find yourself popping up in all sorts of places. Shudder.
A fascinating exploration. Thank you for your time and work.