A Few Generative AI Technologies

Here are just a few of the many generative AI technologies available as I type this in June 2024.

ChatGPT – This is the tool from OpenAI that launched in November 2022 to great disruption. The paid version is more powerful and flexible than the free version. It can generate images and search the web and do math and more.

Gemini – Google’s entry was originally named Bard, but it is now named Gemini. Like with ChatGPT, the paid version (Gemini Advanced) is much better than the free version. Either version requires logging into Google.

Claude – Anthropic’s AI tool Claude is very powerful, especially the paid version. It is perhaps the best way to have AI read and analyze a long document.

Perplexity – This one is useful if you don’t want to login but still use generative AI. The pro version is better, but the regular version doesn’t require a login. And it’s pretty good at searching the web to cite its sources.

Midjourney – This is my favorite AI image generator, but it’s not obvious how to use it. For one thing, you can only use within the messaging app Discord! But if you’re already a Discord user, this is one to try. (They have a web interface, but it’s in alpha.)

DreamStudio – This image generator is powered by Stable Diffusion. You can try it out for free, although you’ll need to create an account (or connect it to something like Google).

Adobe Firefly – This is Adobe’s entry into image generation. It is supposed to be trained on images that were permissioned for such training, so it doesn’t have the intellectual property concerns other image generators have.

Say What You See – This isn’t actually a generative AI tool, but if you’re wary of using such a tool, this is a useful way to learn a little about how they operate. It presents a series of images, asking you to try to come up with the prompt that might have generated them.

character.ai – This website has a big collection of pre-generated chatbots that take on particular personas. I’ve heard from instructors who find these useful, like the political science professor who had her students talk with a James Madison chatbot.

HeyGen – I haven’t used this tool, but my colleague Betsy Barre has used it to make relatively convincing fake videos of herself using very little input data. This is one where you have to pay to use it in a robust way, but you might get to use it a little for free to see what it does.