My Unbased Opinion Of Some AI Tools

So, this post actually came up as a response to a question on Reddit where I was writing a really long comment. Then, the idea struck me: maybe I should post this on Medium. I might help someone looking for the same tools as me, or at least someone can possibly laugh at my excuse (which makes it totally worth it, since we should all laugh more).

Full disclaimer: I am a programmer who knows how to create or quickly learn how to create these tools for my use. I know it’s all GPT-3 based, and I either need to ask the right questions or combine it with something else in code. However, I work 40 hours a week and am tired most of my life, so I don’t have the time or will to figure it all out. This makes me willing to pay for tools that I actually like. I know, shameful, right? But I do have one or two AI tool ideas I want to develop, so I am focusing on them and just enjoying everything else. Isn’t that what we work for? To survive the month and spend everything else on things we want but probably don’t need?

By the way, if you are a casual reader, the paragraph above is mostly for fellow colleagues who might be enraged at me for paying for tools.

I went crazy exploring tools this month because I am looking for one that can do specific tasks for me or that I want to test out. I am pretty sure if I take a serious look at my credit card bill, I will regret it, so let’s avoid that at all costs. I also suffer from high-level anxiety, so most subscription plans feel like an impulsive purchase without a refund policy.

Being completely honest, I am on Medium for the AI updates, so I am not a serious writer and am doing this just because: since I am here anyway, why not? Also, I am not a native English speaker; Google Docs corrects me a lot, and I will rely on ChatGPT for corrections. If there are any mistakes, that’s why. By the way, full respect for the serious writers here, as they are the reason I am here to begin with — to consume your excellent content.

So, below is my journey with AI so far:

SEARCHING FOR SPECIFIC THINGS I WANT:

Write complete fanfics with good narrative and concisely, based only on plot, character descriptions, and some pointers:

I have plot ideas but lack writing knowledge or the time/will to learn. I can’t develop the narrative acceptably and mostly struggle with dialogues if they are not sarcastic or funny. In general, I would like to see some of these ideas actually written. I am also looking for a not very complex tool since this is just a hobby. I don’t want to spend hours configuring it.

ChatGPT: can’t get it to do what I want. I probably should try a few more times. I haven’t tried the API, so maybe it’s something to consider.

NovelAI: no actual sign-up, test for free. Good for assisting writing but not for generating everything.

HoloAI: this one got me excited. I actually signed up, but it’s not good for what I want.

CloseCopy: Phind misled me on this one. I asked for a storyai.cc , and it gave me an unrelated response. This tool is more for business writing like ads and blogs.

Sudowrite: good for brainstorming, not autonomous.

Writesonic: not for what I need.

Jasper: not for what I need.

Subtxt: professional narrative building with a very complex system. I just need to write fanfic. I had to sign up to test, so that was unfortunate.

Story.cc: the closest I got to a good result. The story it generates is actually good, but limited to one brief one-shot. I provided feedback asking for chapters and am waiting for a response.

2. Translate Thai videos to English, generating subtitles:

As a big fan of Thai BL, I really have this need. Many tools do this, but they are expensive since my videos can be 50 minutes long. I was looking for a good custom benefits option, and it was quite a struggle.

FreeSubtitles: winner in this category as it allows uploading videos of any length for free, as long as you have patience to wait. It has a reasonable price if not. The translation is medium/good. Price is $0.99/h.

WeAreNova: good translation but high price with ridiculous limits for translation time and file length. Only usable on the high tier, which is $55/m for 900 minutes of translation. To compare, the tier below is $18/m for 300 minutes of translation. For those who say $55 is a fair price, remember that not everyone lives in the US or Europe, and anything above $25 is like asking for a kidney.

Typito: good translation, $29/m for unlimited. Lower tier is $15/m with a 10-minute project duration limit (seriously?).

HappyScribe: $0.20 per minute.

VideoTranslator: $0.30 per minute for pay-as-you-go, $10 for the low tier that allows $0.15 per month ($10 but you still have to pay for it).

SmartCat: counts in words. How do I calculate that? Not considering this one.

Translate.video: highest tier $99 for a limit of 60 minutes of translation (no custom benefits at all).

Gengo: $0.06 per word, no idea what that means.

TypeStudio: highest tier $36/m for 40 hours, lower tier $20/m for 10 hours.

Sonyx: Standard: 10 hours, pay as you go. Premium: $25/m for the right to have a $5 per hour price.

Keevi: highest tier $30 for 2 hours of video.

OTHER THINGS I AM SEARCHING FOR BUT HAVE NOT EXPLORED MUCH:

Task management: I want a simple one. I tell it my tasks and due dates, and it reminds me what I need to remember (because I forget a lot of things). I tried some AI assistants, but they have very complex functionality for my simple needs.

Finance management: I seriously don’t know what I want with one (something that can magically sort out my financial chaos, maybe?), but I’ll know it when I see it.

THINGS I AM USING:

Supermeme: I have so much fun with this one. I’m still using my credits. The plans are on the higher side for casual users and are more focused on brands. I sent feedback asking for smaller package options for casual users; let’s see if that happens (I just want to post on WhatsApp and social media). I really like their meme-for-theme tool, where you input your thought, and it generates memes about it.

Cursor: An IDE for coding with ChatGPT integration for FREE. Still testing, but very promising.

CHROME EXTENSIONS

Summary with ChatGPT: It’s great to be able to summarize every site, article, etc. It only asks for an OpenAI key and doesn’t require a subscription.

Speechify: I got a one-year subscription to this one. It’s very useful for “reading” things while coding.

ChatGPT for Google: ChatGPT answers along on the Google page (I still go there sometimes). It only asks for an OpenAI key.

Prompt Box: Easy access to your most-used prompts (not actually with AI, but related and useful).

WebChatGPT: Provides ChatGPT with on/off web search for answers.

ChatGPT for YouTube: Very good; it summarizes YouTube videos. It asks for an OpenAI key and a subscription (still considering whether to subscribe or not; it’s $4, not horrible, but still looking for a similar free solution).

Bing Chat for All Browsers: Use Bing chat on Chrome or your prefered brwoser.

AUTONOMOUS AI:

My objective is to make it code a full applications and perform other complex tasks for me.

AutoGPT: Very promising; I’m closely watching and testing this one. I was able to get results on simple tasks, but a few problems include looping and getting lost, overthinking and not getting to the end of the task, and spending a LOT of tokens. I haven’t tried the latest version yet; maybe these problems have improved.

LoopGPT: More focused than AutoGPT; it works well for web research but can’t figure out how to make it code (it only creates files with “INSERT CODE HERE” written inside).

AgentGPT: More focused than AutoGPT; being web-based, it’s only for text-expected results, but it’s a good solution for web search.

Jarvis: Downloaded in the early days; couldn’t run, only gave me errors. I’ll try again sometime, but not a great start (my faith in Microsoft is very low; I mean, I have to use Teams for work).

Random Thought: Maybe if I code an autonomous agent focused on it, it could solve my fanfiction generation problem; I should look into that.

SEARCH ENGINES (Don’t we all want to get rid of Google at this point?):

Phind: The best one I’ve found so far; it gives really cool results.

Bing: 50/50 on whether the results will help you; depends on the content. If it’s an easy topic, sure (isn’t it supposed to be GPT-4? What did Microsoft do to mess this up so much? Even GPT-3 with a Google Chrome search summary extension does better).

You.chat: Better than Bing, but still not quite there; also, no memory, like when you ask a follow-up question, and it just doesn’t understand.

Grep: I use it sometimes; Phind is still better, but it’s interesting.

Metaphor: Most of the time, it really misses the mark, but it was the one that finally recommended story.cc for me when I searched for my exact needs, so I was impressed. I’ll keep an eye on it for more testing.

Perplexity: Pretty good, in the same level as phind.

IMAGE GENERATION:

Midjourney: I subscribed to try this for a month. It gives excellent results, but I find it expensive and sometimes complex and challenging to make it do what you want without deep learning of its inner workings. I won't be renewing my subscription.

StableDiffusion: I still need to try the newer models, but when I did, it gave strange results. It's nice that it's free.

DALL-E: Offers good results, but it shares the same problem as Midjourney in making it understand what you want.

Open.ai: This is the chosen one; it understands me well, provides nice results, and is free.

SPOT OF HONOR — CamelAI

Communicative Agents for “Mind” Exploration of Large Scale Language Model Society

Is a very cool idea to put AI Agents personas talking with eachother about a theme, in the demo you choose the personas you want, the theme and start their interaction.

So, that's it for today. I'm open to tool suggestions and constructive criticism (just remember, no overly complex ones, as this is just a hobby).

Now, a few memes about AI that i made with SupermemeAI:

Thanks everyone!!