29 Comments
Feb 4Liked by Daniel Nest

I have a specific burping question or two.

1) Where on Substack, or if necessary elsewhere, can one find sites built of AI generated content? A directory, a group site, an association of AI writers, an article listing prominent AI content sites, or something like that etc.

2) Who on Substack, or if necessary elsewhere, has moved beyond chanting "AI content is inferior to human content" to a focus on learning how to use AI tools so that the AI content is not inferior? Who is looking forward instead of back?

3) Why can't President Biden just nuke Discord and put it out of it's misery?

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Phil (and Daniel), if you haven't gotten to know the folks over at the Tech Writers' Stack, you might connect with a few of them on their forward-looking nature! This is a more technical group than any other I've been involved with, and several of the contributors/participants are coders to boot.

https://techwriters.substack.com/

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Feb 4·edited Feb 4Author

1) I am not aware of any off the top of my head, but I'll try to ask on Notes (even though it they don't tend to get much traction). If there's someone with "pure AI content" experience, it could be fun to hear their thoughts.

2. Same answer, even though I wouldn't necessarily refer to "using AI to enhance human processes" as "looking back." I think "replacing human content with AI" and "enhancing human capabilities with AI" are both forward-looking schools of thought, so it's a matter of preference.

3. 42!

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Feb 4Liked by Daniel Nest

Thanks Daniel, as always.

By now I think you understand my obsession. If AI is going to be to the content biz as tractors were to farm work, and robots were to the factory, then....

It's probably time for the Substack community to start preparing for what is coming.

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Feb 4Liked by Daniel Nest

I feel you on Arc, I'm an android user too and I'm so jealous of anyone getting their browser on phone 🤌

Nice recc with Patrick - subscribed

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I do expect them to eventually make Android and Windows versions. Patience is a virtue and all that. Great to hear you're following Patrick now!

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Feb 4Liked by Daniel Nest

I'm not virtuous Dan, I want my pretty browser 😭😅

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Hahaaa. There there. You'll get your Arc soon!

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I'm also an Android user. I use the Arc browser on my iMac, but would love to be able to try out Arc Search on my phones.

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Feb 4Liked by Daniel Nest

Can we riot? 👀

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I've never rioted. Willing to try to train an AI bot to riot on my behalf though

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Now that's true delegation!

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HA, yes

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Feb 9Liked by Daniel Nest

Thanks for the info on the Shopify image editor, but its not live yet and obviously aimed at a commercial market.. So is there a truly free AI image editor that can remove and replace backgrounds of photos etc that we can really use for free now? So many say free but have 7 day free trials and then automatically start charging you, so they are rather warping the concept of free.

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Just did a quick search and found these two:

https://mokker.ai/ - claims to give you 40 photos for free

https://www.fotor.com/features/backgrounds.html - gives you a dozen free starting credits (just tested it and it works.)

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Feb 9Liked by Daniel Nest

Thanks I'll check those out too. Adobe Express did the whole job, cutting out and replacing the background for free.

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Perfect. In my testing, Adobe was the best of the truly free background removers, and very easy to use as well.

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Feb 9·edited Feb 9Author

Yup: Shopify's editor is only out in spring as I highlighted.

Adobe Express has a background remover that works well and is 100% free: https://www.adobe.com/express/feature/image/remove-background

(It was one of my recommended free tools in this article: https://www.whytryai.com/p/free-online-image-tools)

If you need to then replace the background, I'd try it in combination with "Generative Fill" in Adobe Firefly: https://firefly.adobe.com/upload/inpaint (You could technically use JUST the generative fill, as long as you can accurately select the areas around the object.)

Let me know how/if it works for you!

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Feb 5Liked by Daniel Nest

I’m not sure how you manage it, but each newsletter surpasses the last! The blend of news, art, simplicity, and community engagement is truly remarkable. 👏👏👏

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Thanks Nat, I really appreciate the support and encouragement here!

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I wouldn't say I'm over the moon with Bard rolling this feature out, but it's one of 2 tools I use every day, so it's really relevant. Perhaps it'll be a while before Bard can churn out better images than Dall-E 3, but I imagine they'll be different enough to be interesting.

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How come you have your reservations about Bard? Or do you mean you're not impressed with the image quality itself? The cool thing about having it in Bard is that you can now discuss images conversationally and go back and forth, just as you do in ChatGPT Plus with DALL-E 3.

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I mainly just mean it is the 2nd best of the 2 tools I use, at least at present. If I had to choose between GPT4 and Bard, there's no contest in at least 90% of spots. One place Bard does really well (not shocking) is with more basic research, much more akin to intelligent search results. I think it delivers these in a manner that can often be more trustworthy than GPT4, and also in ways that are much quicker and to the point. Research is really the main thing I do, so I do get to see Bard's good side, and how there can be certain advantages.

I'm guessing the same will be true of images (only just now fiddled with them a bit, and I'm sure I can work with what I see). Probably, GPT4's images will be consistently cooler for a while, but Bard may have some edges. I'll let you know!

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I'm actually impressed at how good Imagen 2 seems to render text on realistic images, especially since Google was very low-key about it and didn't highlight it as the main feature like DALL-E 3 and Ideogram did.

I probably use Bard even less than you, but with all the latest buzz around it, I'll try to give it another chance. I'm even contemplating a "Battle Of Chatbots" post where I try different tasks in Bard, ChatGPT, Copilot, etc.

Judging by the current votes in today's poll, we're not the only ones skeptical of Bard. It didn't get a single vote so far.

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Did you do a previous "battle of chatbots", or at least a thing where you compared models side by side?

Over enough time, it might be really cool to see how each company has changed over time in those rankings. I bet Google moves up pretty fast.

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I did not, actually. There were so many others that did it because it was such a hot topic, so I didn't feel like adding to the noise. I did do the Battle Of Bands (music tools), text-to-video, and text-to-image model roundups though, so perhaps a chatbot round-up is in order. Not sure whether to do a "Here are all the X chatbots and I casually try them" or more of a "Deep dive into these specific 3 most popular chatbots for this specific purpoe" type of article, but let's see.

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You could do one article on just chatting for research, maybe, then one on just images. It could be a short series, mayhap?

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