I make a lot of content on this channel about iPhone, iPad and Mac specific tools and features,
and I love doing that, but I wanted to try something a bit different today,
and make a video that anyone with an internet connection and a computer could get something
from. So in this video, I’m going to share with you 5 amazing websites and browser extensions,
that use Artificial Intelligence to achieve some truly remarkable things. Stick around to the end,
if you’re even the slightest bit interested in AI, I think you’re going to be amazed at what
some of these tools can do. OK, let’s get into it.
I feel like I can’t really create a video about AI websites without mentioning Craiyon, spelt
with an AI in the middle of it, I see what you did there. If you’ve followed AI in any form recently,
you may have heard of Dall E, the OpenAI project that takes a text input, and turns that text input
into original, realistic images at the push of a button. That tool is mind-blowing, but it’s
also still in the process of rolling out to the masses, but in the meantime, we have Dall E Mini,
or as it’s now known, Craiyon. The premise of Craiyon is the same as it’s big brother, it’s
just that the results aren’t quite as spectacular, but they’re still really impressive and a lot of
fun. You input some words into a text box, and then you hit the pen button here on the right,
and you let the AI do it’s work, creating 9 images for you, based on what you type in.
So for example, I could type in Koala smoking painting, and in less than a minute, this is
the kind of result that I get back. Or I could type in pigeon, beach,
iPhone watercolour, and this is the kind of thing we’re going to see.
Or how about Pumpkin Girl? Yeah, sorry about that one, that’s going to be in my nightmares.
You can get some absolutely incredible results, and this thing is horrifically addictive,
I can’t tell you how long writing this particular section of the video has taken,
thanks to me getting stuck in an endless loop of saying, “I wonder what would happen if I type this
in”. Give it a try, and if you create anything particularly impressive or funny or terrifying,
drop a comment with the keywords so I can give it a go myself.
Onto a slightly less creepy and significantly more useful AI tool now,
this is Jenni AI. The team behind Jenni AI describe it as a content assistant that you
can take with you, while writing your blogs, copy or anything else. Essentially, if you’re a writer,
you’re going to have struggled with writer’s block at some point, and Jenni AI is designed to
help get you past that, giving you prompts and suggestions as you write, to keep you moving.
Once logged in, you’ll start by creating a new document. You can tell Jenni what it is that
you’re writing, whether that’s a blog post, an email, an essay or something else entirely. I’ll
choose blog post, because actually for me, when I’m creating videos, these are pretty much visual
blog posts. In title, I’ll type something in, and then in the description of my blog, which is an
optional field, I’m going to input a description of what it is that I want to talk about.
I’ll choose my tone of voice for Jenni down at the bottom, and then hit the Start Writing button.
You can see that, as I move from the title of the blog into the body of it,
a suggestion of text appears, with a prompt underneath it.
If I like this, I can hit the right arrow on my keyboard to accept the included text,
or I can press shift and the right arrow to see some other options. I’m going to try that.
Once I’ve found something that I like, I’ll press the right arrow to accept it, and Jenni will
continue making suggestions for me. At any time, I can simply take over and begin typing myself,
and the more that I do this, the more information it gives Jenni,
and the better it’s prompts will become. Now, my take with AI is that it should
be used as a tool to support you in your work, rather than creating all of your work for you,
I wouldn’t use this to write out an entire script for example, but I would use it to
give me a starting point to work from, or to get me past a bad bout of writer’s block.
Artificial Intelligence is all well and good, but something that’s just intelligent, is keeping
backups of your most important files, and the sponsor of today’s video, Samsung, knows a few
things about that. This is the T7 Shield, their most recent addition to the T7 range, called the
shield because this thing is built to be used. An IP65 rating means that any data you store on this
is resistant against both water and dust, as well as drops from up to 3 metres, so if this comes
tumbling out of your bag when you’re travelling, no worries. With sequential read speeds of up to
1,050 MB per second, and sequential write speeds of up to 1,000 MB per second, this will allow you
to transfer large files to and from your devices with blistering speed, or even edit things like
4K video directly from the drive, thanks to it’s Dynamic Thermal Guard technology, keeping excess
heat to a minimum. The storage here is up to 9 and a half times faster than a typical external HDD.
It’s small enough to slip into a coat pocket, or the inside pocket of a bag, and at just 98 grams,
you’ll barely know it’s there, but you can get a 1 or 2TB version of this, so whilst it might be
physically small, the inside is anything but. And it’s compatible with your device, regardless of
whether you’re a Mac user like me, or whether you prefer PC, Android, even a gaming console like the
PS5, you’re covered with the T7 Shield. Oh, and it comes in three colours, this moody looking black,
a super vibrant blue, or the earthy looking beige colour that I’ve got, and use as my travel
SSD every time I’m away from the studio. I’ll include some links in the description if you’d
like to learn more or get your own T7 Shield, and thanks again to Samsung for sponsoring this video.
This next tool is super simple in terms of it’s concept, but also super powerful.
If you’ve got a photo or an image where you’d like to remove a part of that image,
say someone in the background of a photo of you and your loved one, you can use this
tool to intelligently do just that. Yes, this function has existed within Photoshop for years,
but you would of course need both access to Photoshop, and the knowledge of how to use
Photoshop, to make it work. Not so here, you’re literally just using a website. Let me show you.
The website is called Magic Eraser. So, here’s a photo of some Sealions
that I took recently on holiday in Monterey, and it’s a good picture already, but let’s say
that I want to remove these rocks up in the top left, to really draw your eyes in to the centre,
but I don’t want to crop the image. What I can do, is upload the image, and then use the zoom button
down here at the bottom to zoom into the area a bit clearer. Then I’m going to choose Brush,
and use it like an eraser, rubbing over the area that I want to remove. Then, I’ll press Erase.
And just like that, it’s gone. I’ll repeat the process for these other rocks up here at the top.
And just like that, they’re gone! You can click down here on the Original button to
see the original, and then flip back to the new image we’ve just created.
You can download a low-res image at no cost, if you want a full-res image,
you’ll need to sign up to one of their pro plans.
One of the biggest challenges, when it comes to learning about complex subjects,
is getting past the jargon, the technical writing that’s related to that industry. Sometimes,
to understand a concept, you just need someone to break that concept down for you into simple,
easy to understand points, and that’s where a Chrome extension called Jargon comes in.
Once you’ve installed this and added it to Chrome, whenever you find yourself on a site with jargon
that you’re struggling to understand, you simply copy a sentence or two, and paste it into the
Jargon box, and Jargon will use AI to translate the text for you, in a much less technical,
much easier to understand manner. You can hit the refresh button to have the AI take another
stab at it if you need to, and if you know what you’re talking about, you can use the thumbs
up and down buttons to rate the quality of the translation, and that feedback will be used by
the developers to improve the tool over time. I’ve tried this out on academic papers
and the issue is that I don’t understand enough about the topic to know if it’s working or not,
even though the results seem pretty good. But where I’ve been really impressed with this,
is in it’s ability to work with legal jargon like contracts, or terms and conditions. It’s one of my
biggest bug bears, the fact that contracts are written in a way that non-legal professionals
would struggle to understand them, and this tool really helps in that regard.
This last site kind of took the internet by storm a couple of years ago, but I’m aware that a lot of
people still won’t have heard of it, or tried it. MyHeritage have a tool that allows you to
animate photos, with pretty remarkable results. The idea, is that you upload a photo of a person
or of people, and let the AI behind MyHeritage do it’s thing, creating a short couple of seconds
worth of animation of that person’s face. The animations are subtle movements, glancing around,
blinking, perhaps smiling slightly, the kind of things that a person might do when they’re
sitting around. And whilst this will work with any photo of a person, the idea is that you might
use this to bring old family photos to life. Now I’ve not included any photos of my family
or my ancestors here, these are all real examples taken from the site itself, but I have tried this,
and it is uncanny. I’ve even tried it with photos of relatives who only passed in the
last few years, relatives that I knew well, and in some cases, this AI was able to create facial
movements that were really reminiscent of the people behind the photographs. I guess where
this becomes interesting then, is in your ability to dig back into your own family history, see what
old photos you can find, and get a feel for what they might have been like, beyond just the photo.
This is a bit of a love-it or hate-it tool, and I can understand why, but as a hopefully enjoyable
way to use AI to better understand where we all came from, I think it’s pretty cool.
So there you go, 5 interesting websites that make use of Artificial Intelligence,
in pretty remarkable ways. Let me know if you have any interesting experiences using any of these,
drop a comment on the video and tell me about it. And also, if you’re a long-term viewer of
the channel, what did you think of this type of video? Is this the kind of thing you’d like to
see some more of in the future? Let me know. And as ever, if you found this video useful,
do please consider leaving me a like, and subscribing to my channel for more content
like this in the future. See you on the next video.