I like fee tools that do their job very well. It’s cool if you can use the tools right away, preferably without registration or installation. Free lazy man tools!
I have a page in my Obsidian vault where I’ve been putting together nice A.I.-based tools and resources that I use or will probably use, or just to keep them there because of my fear-of-missing-out feeling 🙂
Let me share these tools with you, perhaps you can find something useful for yourself too!
ChatGPT and its plugins
The king of such tools is no doubt ChatGPT. Using it is fun, in many ways it’s also useful, although it’s still not at its full potential. My favorite use cases of ChatGPT is learning foreign languages. I also like to work with it when learning programming languages, but you can’t trust it 100% though! 🙂 Working with it in a dialogue makes it more reliable as you can see its limits.
It’s very likely you have already used this service or heard of it, so I’m moving on.
And if you have a subscription to ChatGPT Plus, you have probably heard of narrower purpose-targeted GPTs ranked and selected for you in different categories: https://chat.openai.com/gpts. This is not available for use for free ChatGPT accounts, but I can’t help mentioning it.
Here’s also a list of ChatGPT plugins in a wilder list: https://ai-advantage.notion.site/640360e552b3444e8422948f479740cd?v=ab19a8fc8c0346c1a1a41263478dee8f
How to better ChatGPT
I believe that personalizing your custom ChatGPT assistant is still something to be done in foreseeable future, but you can try tweaking it right now using special prompts. If you are interested, have a look at this resource: https://github.com/f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts and watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVzuvf9D9BU
Since ChatGPT does not know you very well (and can’t read your mind or guess what you mean that sometimes people can do), it has limits in answering your intricate questions properly. Also, ChatGPT is designed to provide you with answers as soon as possible, whereas for better answers it should probably have asked you more questions before giving you answers. So, for now it’s still mainly your responsibility to act provocatively and provide ChatGPT with enough context when asking it something very specific. Providing a context is giving specific descriptions or instructions. Sometimes it looks like programming with a natural language or doing magic spells 🙂
There must be plenty of online resources how to use ChatGPT more effectively and making it act the way you want.
And here I can give you an example that you may find very helpful to get the most useful answers from ChatGPT:
Step 1
Describe your problem for ChatGPT, and at the end of your post add:
Let’s work this out in a step by step way to be sure we have the right answer.
This prompt makes all the answers better. But it’s even more helpful if you are discussing some complex topics with ChatGPT or where there are calculations involved. It helps to to identify errors in ChatGPT’s answers. You should go on in the same chat session without creating a new one.
Step 2
ChatGPT gave you the answer. And now you don’t want to google how correct it is. So you want to use the following prompt:
You are a researcher tasked with investigating the response options provided. List the flaws and faulty logic of each answer option. Let’s work this out in a step by step way to be sure we have all the errors:
After this, ChatGPT will write to you the weaknesses from its first message. The resulting analysis, as a rule, is much deeper than if you simply asked to find errors in the answer.
Step 3
The received criticism needs to be applied somehow. So you enter this prompt:
You are a resolver tasked with 1) finding which of the answer options the researcher thought was best 2) improving that answer, and 3) Printing the improved answer in full. Let’s work this out in a step by step way to be sure we have the right answer
Thus, you will get a well-thought response to your initial query.
Probably such tricks will be unnecessary with the following ChatGPT5, will see 🙂
Directories of AI tools
It feels like we are back in Yahoo directories times 🙂 But anyway, here is a list of A.I. tools with descriptions I keep at hand:
On the one hand, the directories like that are a great resource. On the other hand, we (users) are quite lazy when it comes to making choices. In many ways, we don’t want to evaluate, research and select, we just want to get something solved or done. That’s why, I think, ChatGPT has a great potential in turning into a powerful almost-all-mighty personal assistant that helps us from a single starting point 🙂
Image generation
I use it when I want to create something quickly with decent quality. By the way, the image for this post was generated with this tool. And I was lazy event to write a prompt for it. So I asked ChatGPT to give me a prompt to generate an image for a blog post about AI tools 🙂
This service is Stable Diffusion-based. So for specific-style results you can search examples of Stable Diffusion prompts, and tweaking them to your needs you can create the results you probably want.
And if you want to go more professional in generating images for free, here is how-to tutorial: https://stable-diffusion-art.com/beginners-guide/
Similar model giving beautiful results:
Here’s an online Stable Diffusion playground:
One more StableDifusion-based tool: Stable Diffusion XL Lightning
Another online tool for quick generating images is
Another link I have saved is a demonstration of how to use Dalle-3 model within ChatGPT Plus. Even if you don’t use it, it’s interesting to see the idea that prompting goes interactive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CunfPJjbHPA
Here’s also a resource teaching you how to write better text-to-image prompts: https://www.promptstackscommunity.com/c/text-to-image-school/
Watermarks removing from images
How to prompt
Community helps to write a prompt for a specific result:
Translation and proofreading tools
Apart from well-known Google Translate and Grammarly, here’s less known but still great
- https://www.deepl.com/write (improve your wording) and https://www.deepl.com/translator (translate). Although I personally prefer using ChatGPT in most cases 🙂
Science at fingertips
You can understand science papers easily with this tool.
Take care!
P.S.: This post could have been written by A.I., but for now I decided to write it manually 🙂
BTW, I respect your privacy, and of course I don't send spam, affiliate offers or trade your emails. What I send is information that I consider useful.
It’s amazing how versatile these tools can be when used creatively.
Yeah, it’s changing the way we interact with content 🙂