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The discourse surrounding AI and its use is almost as polarising as politics at a family gathering or reviewing a Playboi Carti album. The sheer mention of AI will either raise the hairs on the back of your neck or you’ll start noticing your breathing getting heavy as you imagine the possibilities.
I’ll be upfront about my bias. Through and through, I’m a creator. My job is to write silly little articles and make TikToks that don’t look like I’m being held at gunpoint (to varying success). My girlfriend was an animator who changed careers to become a tattoo designer due to AI making multiple animation jobs redundant.
If you had asked me three months ago what my stance on AI was, I would have been fiercely opposed to it and cynical about its future. Tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney have put several creative industries in speculative jeopardy.
As the boom has continued, and new tools and software have been announced that don’t revolve around content generation, more ways to engage with AI as a tool for good are starting to look more and more viable.
At the heart of it is that these AI tools are just that — tools. Which tools you use, and how you use them depends on you.
Here are some ways you can use AI to help improve your everyday routine without feeling like you’re committing a sin.
Research
As a writer, the prospect of using AI for my work makes me feel like a class traitor. Thankfully, AI exists out there as a research tool to track down legitimate sources and find summaries of events, while providing legit references written by humans.
Perplexity AI has been a site that some writers have taken on board. It’s essentially a search engine that’s also a research assistant. If you have a research question, you can search for it on the site and it’ll generate a quick summary that pulls from multiple up-to-date sources and lists them for you. There’s also a copilot feature that will let you follow up with questions and get better informed results. This way, you don’t end up on page five of Google results, recycling search terms to find what you’re looking for.
A big issue with using ChatGPT for research is that it can often hallucinate facts and won’t provide sources or footnotes to where it derived its answers. With Perplexity, you won’t have this issue and can streamline the time it takes you to find good, recent sources for whatever you’re researching.
Hardware Integration
Unless you’re a tech reporter waking up at 3 am to cover the latest industry panel or a huge Marc Ribillet fan, you may have missed the overwhelming focus tech companies are now putting on integrating their hardware with AI.
I have spent many hours watching Linus Tech Tips explain performance benchmarks on new AI hardware, coming away a bit lost and confused due to the overwhelming amount of jargon involved. It’s a bit of a problem facing AI tech from a consumer perspective, but it can be fairly easy to break down when you lay it out.
For example, let’s look at some of HP’s latest AI laptops, which cover a wide range of different uses. The Elitebook laptop model is designed as a work device and comes with collaborative tools and HP Wolf Security to protect your device. The HP Spectre is a more flexible multi-use laptop, with hardware enabling it to be used for gaming or design. All of these new laptops come installed with Intel’s new Ultra Processor chip, which helps enable its AI features, and boost its performance.
These new processors have been said to offer a 25 per cent reduction in power consumption and improve multi-threading performance compared to competing laptop processors. In essence, this enables the computer to last longer and the software to work faster with fewer performance dips.
These CPUs also come with a neural processing unit (NPU), which offers low-power AI acceleration for CPU/GPU offloading. This helps the computer perform AI-powered tasks like background blurring, eye tracking and picture framing smoothly. So even if you’re not keen on using it for anything related to AI content generation, it should still improve your overall performance.
For HP’s newer gaming laptops, they come installed with AI cooling software that detects when the laptop starts overheating and automatically adjusts its power towards cooling it down. This all happens in the background so you don’t have to adjust anything.
In short, AI software already exists for hardware to help boost performance across the board.
Transcribing
We have all experienced the pain of taking notes through a class or meeting, which by the end, thanks to wrist strain and fatigue, end up looking indescribable.
Automatic transcription is a recent tool made to help alleviate this. Tools like Otter.ai exist to help quickly transcribe recorded audio, which can be a phone call or video. Having to go over what could end up being hours of footage to transcribe a recording word by word is enough to make anyone reconsider their line of work. It’s an immense time saver for any serious note-taker.
Photo editing
Multiple photo apps have started to implement AI tools to help streamline the editing process. For example, Google Photos has implemented several photo editing features that let you make quick and seamless edits to your photo in the app. These include editing out background objects in photos, unblurring tools and improving the lighting features.
If you’re a photo editor, or even just someone looking to quickly fix up a photo before sending it off to a group chat, this can save you a heap of time. What’s even better, is that it’s kept within the same app you’re storing photos on, so you don’t need to load up different photo editing software just to make the quick change.
It’s good to have a healthy speculation when it comes to AI and to stand-up for creatives when ethical concerns arise in how it’s used. Thankfully, there are examples out there that prove how we can use some AI tools for good and won’t put anyone out of a job, or steal from someone else’s hard work.
If you’re in the market for a new laptop and want to prepare for the next generation of tech, consider checking out HP’s new line of laptops to get started.
Image credit: Stock / gremlin
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