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.

https://ideogram.ai/

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.

See art

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?

Bing Image Creator

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:

Animated drawings

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.

Playground

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.

Leiapix

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:

Teresa Berndtsson / Better Images of AI / Letter Word Text Taxonomy / CC-BY 4.0

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.

Better images of AI

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.

Perplexity

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.

SciSpace

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