Start Here: Guide to Why Try AI

Intro to the newsletter and a "Table Of Contents." Kinda.

Oh no!

You went and did it, didn’t you?

You saw Start Here and figured, “Hey, maybe I should click it!”

And then you did.

And now you’re here.

Well, let’s do this, then!

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If you want to learn a bit more about Why Try AI, check out my About page.

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Exclusive Bonuses for Premium Members

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📋Table of Contents (Kinda)

Let’s face it: Substack’s Archive page isn’t great.

You can’t even filter or sort it in any meaningful way.

That’s why this Start Here page exists.

Below is a manually categorized archive of Why Try AI posts.

I hope it makes it easier to find what you’re looking for!

Here are the category shortcuts:¹

• 📰 AI News

• 👩‍💻 AI Coding

• 🗣️ AI Chatbots & LLMs

• 🖼️ AI Images

• 🎵 AI Music & Audio

• 📽️ AI Video

• 💡 Opinion

• 🎨 Midjourney

• ❔ Other

• 🤝 Collaborations

If you’re still stuck or have a question, I’m just a button click away:

📰 AI News

Every Sunday, I catch you up on AI news. Find all 100+ issues here:

• Sunday Rundown: Weekly Sunday column with the latest AI developments.

👩‍💻 AI Coding

Posts about programming with AI.

• I “Made” a Computer Game (and So Can You)

• Can I, a Noob, Create a Useful Site With The Help Of AI? Let's Find Out! (Part One.)

• Noob Creates a Useful-ish Site With The Help Of AI. (Part Two.)

• I Asked Claude to Make 5 Useful Apps. Here’s How It Went.

• 12 Starter Apps in Google AI Studio: Tested

• Google’s Opal: A Closer Look

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🗣️ AI Chatbots & LLMs

Everything to do with prompting and working with large language models.

• Lex: The Simple Way to Try AI Copywriting

• AI Language Models Just Got Even Better!

• Yes, There’s a 100% Free Way to Use GPT-4!

• Learn Prompting, Not Prompts

• 11 Practical Uses for Bing's Image Recognition

• Getting Started With Advanced Data Analysis in ChatGPT

• LLM Benchmarks: What Do They All Mean?

• ChatGPT Plus Upgrades: Are They Worth It?

• I Made a Few GPTs. Here’s What I Learned.

• “Help Me Help You.” How to Get AI Chatbots To Prompt Themselves.

• Zero-Shot, One-Shot, Few-Shot, More?

• Chain-of-Thought Prompting: It’s off the Chain

• NotebookLM: Beginner Guide

• 5 Ways to Help AI Chatbots Not Sound Like AI Chatbots

• ChatGPT’s "Memory" Is Kind of Meh. But You Can Change That.

• 12 Charts ChatGPT Can Draw

• The Skeptical Writer's Guide to AI

• 5 Best LLMs You Can Use for Free

• 3 Free Sites to Compare LLMs

• DeepSeek-R1: The Free o1 Alternative

• It Takes Two to Tango. Why You Should Use GPT-4o and o1 in Tandem.

• OpenAI Joins the “Deep Research” Trio

• Claude 3.7 Sonnet: Fantastic Model Held Back by Lack of Native Internet Access

• No-Prompt Prompting? So Lazy, It Just Might Work!

• Don’t Sleep On Genspark’s Super Agent

• Can AI Tell a Good Story?

• Turns Out I’m a Robot. (Some Thoughts on AI Fiction)

• Beginner's Guide To Genspark

• I Tested Three Different AI "Study" Modes

• 3 Easy Fixes for Everyday Chatbot Headaches

• Gemini 3: Google’s Silent Knockout Punch

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🖼️ AI Images

Posts about working with AI image models and tools.

• Turn Your Doodles Into Art Using AI (With Examples)

• How to Test Your Text Prompts With Free AI Art Generators [+Video]

• AI Art Experiment: 3 Prompts, 5 Artists

• How to Use Google’s Autodraw Tool to Create Your AI Art Starting Images

• Mimic Any Image With AI (CLIP Interrogator Demo)

• AI Can Now Help You Write Better Prompts...for AI

• 6 Best Tips From OpenArt’s New Prompt Book

• Replace Stuff in Images Using Only Text

• Bye, Splatterprompting. We Hardly Knew You.

• InstructPix2Pix: Edit Images Using Simple Text Commands

• 7 Free Online Tools to Edit Your AI Images

• Finally, a Beginner-Friendly ControlNet Demo!

• 14 Sites to Help You With AI Art Image Prompts

• SDXL 1.0 vs. Midjourney 5.2: How Do They Compare?

• DALL-E 3: The Cartoonist

• The "Secret Sauce" Behind DALL-E 3: How Is It So Good At Following Instructions?

• 7 Text-To-Image AI Models: Tested

• Want Better AI Images? Ask a Chatbot!

• 10 of My Most Popular AI Image Series (+Prompts)

• From Sketch to Reality: Let’s Test Drive Adobe’s "Structure Reference"

• Which AI Image Model Is the Best Speller? Let’s Find Out!

• How To Find New Styles in Midjourney & Use Genspark to Test Image Prompts

• No, DeepSeek’s Janus-Pro-7B Doesn’t Make Better Images Than DALL-E 3.

• Gemini 2.0 Flash Makes Mediocre Images...But That's Not The Point!

• OpenAI Launches 4o Image Generation, Ruins Reve’s Rad Reveal.

• Text-to-Image Model Showdown: GPT-4o vs. Ideogram 3.0 vs. Reve 1.0

• 5 Style Modifiers. 6 Image Models.

• 3 Neat GPT-4o Image Tricks To Try

• Beginner's Guide to Google Whisk

• Hands-on with Krea 1: Does It Really Get Rid of the “AI Look”?

• Nano Banana Is Fantastic, But Don't Bury Photoshop Just Yet

• Seedream 4.0: Nano Banana Killer?

• How To Create Consistent Visuals With Recraft

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🎵 AI Music & Audio

Posts about AI music models and tools.

• Google Has Impressive New Music AI. And No, You Can’t Have It.

• Battle of the Bands: MusicLM vs. MusicGen vs. Riffusion

• Battle of the Bands II: MusicFX vs. MusicGen vs. Stable Audio

• Battle of the Bands III: Riffusion vs. Suno vs. Udio

• 10 Free AI Voice Cloning Tools: Tested

• Complete Beginner’s Guide to Voice AI

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📽️ AI Video

Posts about AI video models and tools.

• A Taste of Text-To-Video: Two Recent Tools

• 6 Text-To-Video Sites: Tested

• Let’s Make a Movie Teaser With AI

• 17 Free AI Image-To-Video Tools: Tested

• 6 Free Article-To-Video Tools: Tested

• Sora 2: Amazing Model. Dubious Rollout.

• 3 Ways to Make Movie Clips with Sora 2

• 6 Practical Use Cases for Sora 2 Image-to-Video

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💡 Opinion

My thoughts and opinions about AI.

• The Current Pace of AI Progress Is...Nuts?

• Surprising Parallels Between Text-To-Image AI Models & Mobile Operating Systems

• Just How "Dead" Is Google, Anyway?

• It’s Been One Year. Thank You for Being Here!

• The Pace of AI Progress [Revisited]

• Minimum Viable Prompt: Your Cure for AI Overwhelm

• 3 Myths About AI That Just Won't Die

• Is There an Ethical Way to Use AI?

• RIP, GenAI? Whoa, Hold Your Horses!

• AI Can Be Funny. But It Needs Your Help.

• Here Are My Go-To AI Tools

• Are We Even Ready For AI Search?

• Plans, Polls, and Predictions

• Just How Open Is "Open-Source" AI?

• HeyGen Avatar IV: Deepfakes Are Point-and-Click Now.

• Why Every AI Launch Sounds The Same

• AI Is Simple. Just Ask the Experts.

• I Checked Out All 35 Google Labs Experiments: Here's The Scoop

• Back in My Day, AI Was Hard.

• My 7 AI Predictions for 2025: How Did I Do?

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🎨 Midjourney

I’ve written so much about Midjourney that it deserves a standalone category.

• How to Remix Images With Midjourney V4: Step-By-Step Guide

• Midjourney V5 Is Finally Here! How Does It Stack Up?

• Midjourney Version 5.1: Back to Basics

• Midjourney Commands List: Hands-on Guide

• Midjourney Version 5.2: Zoom Out. Enhance.

• How To Insert Your Face Into Midjourney Images

• Guide To Midjourney’s "Vary (Region)" Inpainting Tool

• How To Use Negative Prompts in Midjourney?

• How to Craft Your Own Midjourney Style

• Using Midjourney "Blend" for Fun and Profit. (But Mostly for Fun.)

• Midjourney Version 6: Look Ma, Text!

• Midjourney Finally Does Consistent Characters. Let's Play!

• 3 Neat Midjourney Tricks You Should Try

• Ditch These Pointless Midjourney Photography Terms

See also:

Workshop: Midjourney Masterclass

110 Best Midjourney Prompt Modifiers: Visual Guide (+330 Copy-Paste Prompt Ideas)

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❔ Other

This is a catch-all page for posts that don’t fall into the above categories.

• 3 New Generative AI Tools You'll Enjoy

• 3 Awesome AI Toys We’ll Get Very Soon

• 9 Neat AI-Driven Recommenders to Check Out

• Goofing Around With AI: 5 Fun Sites to Try

• How Does AI Actually Work? 28 Learning Resources.

• AI for Kids: 12 Sites to Check Out

• How to Level Up Your Job Hunt With AI

• The 10 Comm-AI-ndments

• 5 Free AI Tools For Learning & Exploration

• How to Master New Topics with AI

• AI Catch-Up: GPT-5 vs. Everything Else

• 14 Niche AI Tools You Should Try

• 18 AI Chrome Extensions Worth Your Time

• 240+ AI Tools That Defined 2025

🤝 Collaborations

Guest posts, podcasts, and other collaborations with different people.

• Can AI Be Funny? - with Andrew Smith ( Goatfury Writes)

• Lenses - with Andrew Smith ( Goatfury Writes )

• Chinese Apps Notch Early Wins in AI Video - featuring a quote from my interview with Juro Osawa of The Information

• AI Alongside Episode 1: Google's Learn About - with Patrick Jordan (Tech & Nonsense)

• AI Alongside Episode 4: Have AI Models Peaked and Do We Care? - with Patrick Jordan (Tech & Nonsense)

• Denmark's Gefion: The AI supercomputer that puts society first - guest post for AIport

• Top Beginner’s Guide to AI Video - guest post for AI Supremacy

• The Magic & Horror of ChatGPT's Image Generator - chat with Tobias Mark Jensen (aka Futuristic Lawyer)

• Genspark 101: Everything You Need To Know - guest post for AI Supremacy

• Trending AI Tools of 2025 - collaboration with Charlie Guo for AI Supremacy

• Complete Guide to Voice AI: Use Cases & Major Players - guest post for AI Supremacy

• Sora 2 Image-to-Video Use Cases & Practical Applications - guest post for Creators AI

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1. Wait. This “Table Of Contents” has its own “Table Of Contents”? What kind of Inception-y page is this?!