Brilliant Weekend Edition
AI trolls Twitter (so you don't have to!). Plus: bad art at high prices, a nail-biter of an app, a search engine greater than Google and removing your ex from photos has never been easier!
GENERATIVE AI is the tech story of the year. In fact, it’s the biggest thing to happen in technology since the creation of the selfie camera. Will AI make everything better or worse? The answer is: Yes!
Mike’s List of Brilliantly Bad Ideas
1. AI that tweets for you even has a “troll mode”
One of the hundreds of new apps based on generative AI technologies like ChatGPT is called Social GPT. It’s a browser plug in from Slash Digital Lab that can not only detect other AI-generated posts, but can also write your social posts for you on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. You can set the tone of the posts to “Normal,” “Smart,” “Positive,” “Negative” and even “Troll.” This is a bizarre product because it appears to target people who want to both “ensure the authenticity of posts” and also post inauthentic posts. Also: What’s the point of acting as a go-between between your followers and AI?
2. This website sells bad AI art for good money
The dirty little secret of AI-generated art is that it’s a numbers game. If you want to create one great image, you have to make hundreds of bad ones. Bad AI art is a dime a dozen, and the worst of it can be found on the r/AIfreakout subreddit. That’s why the BadArt.AI site is so confusing. They’re selling online trash that’s available to everyone free.
3. New app turns your Mac into the world’s most expensive habit changer
A developer with the nasty habit of biting his fingernails invented a system for using the camera in a Mac for nagging. Called Hands Down, the app runs in the background all day. When it detects your hand moving toward your face, it turns the whole screen red, with the words “Hands Down!” to remind you. It even works during Zoom calls.
Mike’s List of Brilliantly Good Ideas
Phind. People like using generative AI tools like ChatGPT for search because you get a single clear answer, instead of a long list of links to click on and sort through. The downsides of ChatGPT are that 1) it can give you a no-good bad wrong answer; and 2) it can be out of date (the main free ChatGPT is based on GPT 3.5 which uses data from before September, 2021. But Phind is a generative AI search engine that gives you both the One True Answer, and also a list of links to sort through. Best of all, it’s based on current data.
Erase It! Have you ever taken a picture, but there’s someone or some thing in the background that ruins it? There are many tools for erasing unwanted parts of photos. But Erase It! is the quickest. You literally just click on the thing you don’t want and it goes away. It’s fast, free and easy.
Mike’s List of Shameless Self Promotions
Why robot vacuums have cameras (and what to know about them)
Are Apple’s upcoming AR glasses already obsolete?
Why remote work is the opportunity of the century for cities
Read my ELGAN.COM blog for more!