Five Things To Talk About Besides Chat GPT
Jake Geller
I build companies & teams that turn BIG, BOLD ideas into actionable plans resulting in profitable businesses. SaaS Enthusiast. Startup Addict.
We get it.
Or at least everyone on my Linkedin timeline seems to.
Everyone has their two cents about this sensational “industrial revolution.” It’s a cultural obsession. It's romanced us. I’d be willing to bet that a lot of us have spent more time of late attending to and learning this robot than our loved ones…
Contrary to what it might seem, I’m not throwing shade with this headline. I believe in the power of Chat GPT.
RATHER, I would like to expand beyond this AI masterpiece and introduce five other AI tools that aren’t getting the buzz and love that Chat GPT has:
There’s other fish in the sea than Chat GPT. Let’s not give it a bigger head than it deserves.
Chat GPT has quite a large shadow.
You can take that in several ways, but I mean it in the sense that it seems to OVERshadow other insanely valuable AI tools. Chat GPT has just stolen the spotlight, but Runway gives you CONTROL of the spotlight.
Here’s a little bit about this tool that can hopefully bring it into full view:
Runway is a collaborative, browser-based content creation machine. It truly might be the last one you’ll ever need - new tools are added every week.
A main focus is on video content - ideation, editing and complete generation - but it hosts a suite of familiar tools as well as 30+ “AI Magic Tools” to boot.
It empowers seamless team collaboration, optimizes workflow, and you can train your own custom model in minutes…but? if you don’t know where to start, it has hundreds of templates to get you going.
Oh - and did I mention it’s FREE for individuals? If you have a team, that cost is stupid cheap - from $12-$28 per person per month.
Here are just some video features:
If you haven’t gathered, these tools alone take the minutiae and tedium out of video editing. One kickass case study? The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Using Runway shaved the editing process down from 5+ hours to 5 minutes.
Here are a handful of more super cool features in the Runway catalog to date:
It seems overwhelming. How can you begin to play with such an extensive tool? Well, they make starting quick and painless with a Google login, and an intuitive dashboard. You can take existing assets or train it to literally create new ones out of thin air to start with.
This one deserves to step out from behind Chat GPT and have? it’s own pedestal and shadow. It’s got a more developed, sharp UI AND has your team in mind, anyways.
We all know by now that any shallow level of attention can tell a robotic composition from organic human-written text. But what about vocals?
Clearly, those silly Tiktok voice-overs are meant to embody a robotic persona - remove personality from the messages. They’re designed to be meme-ready, ready to be adopted and stripped of any humanity. Maybe they’re even designed to annoy you.
On the other side is the emphasis on the power of tone. We all have a range of tone, but we are also limited by it. Some talented, exuberant people are soft spoken. Some talented, timid people have loud, booming voices.?
It’s difficult to combine, to train, to match a lot of the times. But artificial intelligence can accomplish “indistinguishable from real.”
Enter: Altered AI
Altered AI provides the opportunity to translate your voice through a library of custom voices, to adopt for your video. It is synthetic speech that is “indistinguishable from reality.”
Some of us need to give these “attempts,” these copies, a label? (that is, if we have the ability to discern it from natural voices). Many call it “deep fake.” It’s healthy to recognize what’s real and what’s not, but there are harmless applications for “indistinguishable from real,”…and it can be a real benefit for content creation.
Altered AI allows you to produce your own monologue through the microphone of any orator, or drive a whole multi-character production by yourself. It’s browser-based, requiring no downloads, and protected by maximum security,
From “whispered secrets to shouted commands,” you could mimic:
So how does it work?
Their suite of products ranges from $59-$180/month, and they have enterprise-level options, too.
This is not just for us folks with a “sexy voice” (aka raspy after a cold) - this is for those of us who want to elevate our messages through the vehicle of a more suited tone of voice for our purposes, to reach out audiences.
Altered AI is just another example of an AI tool that hasn’t been given the attention it deserves, living under the iceberg that is Chat GPT.
Remember singing into a fan as a kid? ~The original autotune~?
Can’t say it made us sound like anyone actually famous though…
Fast forward to today. We have artificial intelligence tools like Altered that can spruce up our voices. And what kind of world would we live in without competition? Different sizes, different speeds of fans.
Enter a “rival” AI tool, also currently lurking behind Chat GPT's shadow: Replica.
Replica is an AI tool that provides a marketplace of AI-generated voice actors and a studio for text-to-speech tools.
It works with trained voice actors to train the AI, tracking their speech patterns, inflections and tones of voice. Replica drastically speeds up the audio content production process, and provides a whole new universe of opportunity when a robotic voice won’t cut it.
It boasts a voice library from voices around the world for you to “audition” for your project. Then, you simply add dialogue, and play with an array of fine-tuning tools for your perfect voice sample or “take" to modify:
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Who’s using Replica? Content creators leverage this resource for:
Replica is also a place where aspiring voice actors can license and scale their vocals. It has robust security and protection from infringement for all talent, allowing a new way for voice actors to make money.
It makes you think…could we be listening to podcast personalities and not even know it? Regardless, there is no “replica” for our fan concerts. We gotta maintain some semblance of our childhoods.
Chat GPT has “big shoes,” and you know what that means...??It might have BDE (“Big Deal Energy,”) but its shoes are proving to not be so big or special after all, in comparison to the rest of the AI’s kicks.
There’s a growing population of innovative alternatives and complements whose goal is not to fill Chat GPT’s shoes - but start their own lines. Midjourney is one of those little-known cobblers.
Where Chat GPT has text output, Midjourney has imagery. It? describes itself as “an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species.”
A pretty intense claim. I’ll break it down for you:
It’s a Discord-based AI bot where people around the world collaborate to create custom - worlds, characters, imagery - from short text descriptions. You can create entirely fantastical new images, upscale those images or create image variations.
First you’ll need to create a Discord account - you can do so through the Midjourney website - and they make it pretty easy from there.?
There’s a “getting started” channel on their Discord, but i’ll give you the quick and dirty:
1. Go to “newbie” bot channel
2. Type in /imagine and then your text prompt
3. Wait 60 seconds and receive 4 images
4. Click numbered buttons underneath to upscale or get variations
Trial users can make 25 commands before being prompted to subscribe, and then their packages range from $8-$48 per month.
Shoes really only have one thing in common: they attach to our feet as we traverse the ground. AI tools really have one thing in common as well: human-driven machine learning.
The rest is truly up to our imaginations. And I promise you, this is a fantasyland you want to play with.
Sparrow: The “Mature” Rival?
Google is reportedly poised to unleash “AI Judgment Day” upon us. And here we were, thinking Chat GPT was the inevitable “Google slayer”....
Turns out, they have been lowkey prepping… not for THEIR doomsday, but for Chat GPT’s.
An apocalypse looms, threatening to destroy - I mean purify - the AI landscape as we know it. Google has been been quietly plotting, set to catch Chat GPT’s hands in a shape-shifting mit.
Their defense is more of hybrid defense/offense - point is, whatever you call it, their response to the bounty on their head is near:
?The deployment of Sparrow.
Sparrow is the brainchild of DeepMind, Google’s world class AI lab, and its set to launch this year. It claims to be “an information-seeking dialogue agent trained to be more helpful, correct, and harmless" compared to Chat GPT.
It’s rumored to:
All of this is being developed with a healthy dose of caution. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is wary, and cautions about the dangers of AI.?
He says AI is “on the cusp” of reaching a level that could cause significant damage to humanity.
At the risk of being too trusting, I honestly find comfort in this trepidation and transparency from the force that holds our future (past and present) in its hands. Especially with technology that is still raw and volatile.
Curious as I tend to be, I looked up the symbolism of the word “Sparrow.” I had an inkling there was some meaning behind it, a correlation with the ultimate mission.?
I was right. It’s quite fitting and aligned with Google’s vision for a safer, more factual machine:
Sailors got sparrow tattoos hoping it will bring them to heaven if they died at sea.?
They can mean joy and freedom (think: Captain Jack Sparrow).?
Others get inked to represent adaptability and productivity.
Still others wear sparrows to memorialize a loved one who's passed...could this be a metaphor, a prophecy of the end of Chat GPT??
We'll have to wait and see how this plays out, but I for one feel better about the prospects of humanity with more than one giant at work on this - checks and balances.
Roundup
As fascinating, provocative and useful as Chat GPT is…I hope you can now see it’s getting a disproportional amount of attention.
Not only does it have a serious contender vying for its throne - Google Sparrow - but it’s only a sliver of the whole pie. An incomplete toolbox.
Tools like Altered and Replica allow you to AI-ify your voice for any and all content projects.
And Midjourney allows you to bring any idea or thread of ideas to imagery, just with text descriptions.
Not only are the aforementioned tools constantly releasing new features and upgrading, but new AI tools are bursting onto the scene every single day. It’s foolish to believe that Chat GPT was going to rule - monopolize - our culture.
It might be the most consequential, threatening to the world of academia as we know it,? than these…but I’m of the opinion that is not a good thing.?
Sure, we should all keep abreast of the new Chat GPT features…but also keep an ear to the ground for what’s blossoming up around it.