by Senior Technology Writer

Neil C. Hughes

AI can help anyone work smarter, not harder. However, many people with nontechnical backgrounds can feel intimidated and overwhelmed by the pace of technological change. But most are already using AI without even realizing it. Whether it’s a personalized recommendation on Netflix, Spotify, or Amazon or even editing selfies, these are just a few examples of AI seamlessly integrating into our daily lives, making technology more intuitive and helpful.

Other artificial intelligence examples in your life can be found in the predictive text in your emails, real-time language translation apps, and customer service chatbots.

However, it’s time to think bigger and stop missing out on what AI can do for you.

This guide shows you how to use free AI tools to make money and transform your productivity and business. The best place for beginners is generative AI and large language models (LLMs), where all the hype started.

Key Takeaways

• AI can help anyone work smarter, not harder.
• It enhances productivity and creativity across tasks such as content writing, image editing, video production, customer service, SEO optimization, learning, and monetization strategies.
• Generative AI and LLMs are great starting points for beginners to dive into the world of AI.
• Tools like ChatGPT simplify AI use for non-tech users, enhancing productivity and creativity without a steep learning curve.

Table of Contents

What Can AI Do? Enhance Your Overall Productivity

Over the last twelve months, you have probably heard everyone in your workplace discussing an AI chatbot called ChatGPT. Between September 2022 and August 2023 alone, it had recorded 14.6 billion visits. Its popularity and success can be attributed to how easy it is for beginners to work with AI.

You can use it in seconds without a learning curve by simply typing a question or giving simple instructions. You can ask it to write you a blog post, email, essay, lecture, short story, computer code, or even a song about anything you suggest and in any style. ChatGPT also allows you to digest content quickly and gives you a summary of the key points.

The chatbot also makes creating complex Excel formulas easier than ever in seconds. Ultimately, it lives up to the hype by speeding up the creative process in a way you could have never imagined. Just don’t get too lazy, or you might encounter some of the dreaded hallucinations.

While ChatGPT is celebrated for its ease of use and integration into third-party applications, Google Gemini has positioned itself as a formidable competitor by leveraging Google’s ecosystem to offer a more connected and responsible AI experience, particularly appealing to business users seeking reliable and ethically aligned AI solutions.

Transform Your LinkedIn Photo

Thanks to AI, you no longer have to use the 10-year-old photo on your LinkedIn profile to showcase the best version of yourself. After going viral on TikTok last year, the trend of crafting the perfect LinkedIn profile picture with AI represents a remarkable fusion of technology and personal branding.

Solutions like Remini, Aragon, Try It On AI, and AI SuitUp are making it easy for busy professionals to generate studio-quality headshots from the comfort of their homes in a t-shirt and sweatpants.

However, it’s crucial to balance the allure of AI-enhanced images with the need for authenticity in professional settings, reminding us that while technology can enhance our presentation, it should not overshadow the genuine essence of our professional identity.

Supercharge Your Video Creativity

If editing a podcast or a video is your idea of hell, Descript could be a game-changer. This tool allows you to edit audio or videos as a Word-style document. You select the text you want to remove, and Descript’s AI edits the file for you. It even allows you to automatically remove filler words such as “us,” “us,” and “you know.”

Elsewhere, an AI tool called Synthesia allows you to create an AI human who will automatically bring any training video to life in minutes. For example, with minimal effort, I interviewed Mark, an AI-generated human, about the impact of generative AI on the workplace.

This video showcases an innovative approach that merges studio-quality AI avatars and voiceovers across more than 130 languages, making it as straightforward as piecing together a slide deck.

Elevate Your Writing Beyond Grammar and Spelling Checks

Before dispatching an email or unveiling a presentation, it might appear to have passed Microsoft’s spelling and grammar check. But Grammarly’s AI-driven grammar and style checker will reveal many more opportunities to refine your text. This sophisticated tool assists in identifying and correcting typos, eliminating repetitive phrases, and enhancing your choice of words for greater precision.

Additionally, Grammarly provides insightful explanations for its corrections, offering users a deeper understanding of prevalent grammatical mistakes and equipping them with the knowledge to prevent similar errors in the future.

AI writing tools are invaluable allies for writers, spanning a broad spectrum of applications from email composition to storytelling, style enhancement, and even rephrasing for clarity. Tools like Constant Contact and Hoppy Copy offer advanced AI capabilities to craft compelling email content, while platforms such as Sudowrite and Jasper are revolutionizing how narratives and dialogues are constructed, ensuring characters resonate with authenticity and consistency.

For refining writing style and grammar, solutions like Rytr and Writesonic provide insightful feedback to elevate the readability and engagement of texts across genres. Furthermore, Quillbot and Copy.ai improve clarity and offer creative rephrasing to streamline the writing process.

Together, these AI tools mark an era in content generation, assisting writers by automating mundane writing tasks, fostering creativity, and guaranteeing the production of polished material ready for readers.

Enhance Content with AI-Driven SEO Optimization

Neuronwriter offers a sophisticated approach to content optimization, employing AI to suggest NLP terms essential for competing in your desired keyword space. Its extensive semantic analysis capabilities examine your topics or keywords against competitors’ content and preferred Google SERP positions, offering strategic advantages. Neuronwriter not only assists in drafting your article but also monitors your SEO performance, offering real-time scores and recommendations for enhancement.

Natural language processing ensures your content is finely tuned for better search engine rankings, providing a seamless integration of SEO best practices into your writing process.

Master SEO and Keyword Research

AI also makes it easy to kickstart your content strategy. For example, Keyword Insights AI is a tool designed to navigate the complexities of SEO and keyword research. Analyzing and interpreting intricate keyword data transforms raw information into strategic insights, guiding your content direction.

This tool excels in deconstructing and organizing keyword-related data. Simply input a seed keyword and let its AI uncover related queries, assess keyword difficulty, and predict search volumes. This provides a solid foundation for creating or enhancing your content for improved search engine visibility.

Understanding how to use AI effectively in SEO or task management can dramatically improve your productivity and strategic insight into your content or organizational processes.

Create Unique Art

AI tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E 2 showcase the ability of AI to transform written prompts into stunning visuals. Beyond that, they serve as an inspiration for designers and artists. AI acts as a source of ideas, providing fresh concepts that can be refined and personalized, showcasing the harmonious blend of AI innovation with human creativity and expertise.

Adobe Sensei further empowers Adobe’s creative environment, its AI and machine learning platform that simplifies and enriches design tasks. This powerful engine aids in photo adjustments, accurate font selection, and efficient content replacement, freeing creatives to focus more on the artistry of their projects.

By integrating AI, Adobe Sensei elevates productivity, allowing for the seamless realization of creative visions. But collectively, these diverse applications are prime examples of AI at work and showcase how they can bring your ideas to life without needing to understand the entire Adobe Creative Suite.

Elevate Task Management

Organization and task management play a crucial role in whether we achieve our life goals. Todoist, powered by AI, simplifies task organization by helping you keep track of your duties, prioritize them, and adhere to deadlines. Its intelligent features, like predictive suggestions and natural language processing, adapt to your working style, ensuring that important tasks and deadlines are always in view, enhancing your productivity and organizational efficiency.

Tools like Notion and Asana AI also embedded AI into their platforms to streamline organizational tasks significantly. Notion, for instance, leverages AI to facilitate the generation of meeting notes, automate the creation of functions, and summarize extensive pages, thus enabling professionals to manage their workload more effectively.

Similarly, Asana AI allows project managers to obtain concise project summaries, pose inquiries regarding project specifics, and utilize a writing assistant to input project details. These AI-driven capabilities may appear subtle at first glance. Still, collectively, they contribute to substantial time savings and operational efficiencies, empowering users to work smarter and allocate their time to more strategic activities in the workplace.

How to Use AI to Make Money

Leveraging AI to monetize expertise and creativity is becoming increasingly accessible, offering myriad opportunities for generating income. A quick conversation about brainstorming business ideas will take you down a rabbit hole that will help you develop the concept, build your website, and show you how to market your new business.

One innovative approach to making money using AI is creating and selling online courses, where AI software like ChatGPT assists in developing course materials, from brainstorming topics to generating scripts and recording voiceovers. This simplifies content creation and enhances the marketing of these courses, potentially through AI-designed websites.

Tools like NovaAI and LalalAI streamline content creation. NovaAI, for example, facilitates rapid video content creation, while LalalAI offers unique avenues for producing and selling music, demonstrating AI’s transformative impact across diverse creative endeavors.

AI also opens up profitable avenues in customer service through AI chatbots, addressing a high volume of customer inquiries efficiently. Businesses can now deploy AI chatbots like Botsonic on their websites, offering round-the-clock customer support, from answering FAQs to guiding users in troubleshooting, enhancing customer experience while reducing the workload on human staff.

Related: What Are the Benefits of AI?

This technological advancement serves businesses in managing customer interactions and presents a lucrative opportunity for AI consultants and developers to tailor AI solutions for varied business needs.

The Bottom Line

While AI tools enhance efficiency and streamline tasks, they complement rather than replace the invaluable business insight, creativity, and innovative ideas you bring. Your distinctive vision and dedication remain at the heart of your and your enterprise’s success.

Remember, utilizing AI apps for routine tasks such as email drafting, video creation, or devising marketing strategies helps you maintain control over your projects. It also enables you to optimize your workflow to work smarter and elevate productivity without compromising your essential role in the creative process.

As we look to the future, AI applications will continue redefining our approach to solving complex problems, enhancing creativity, and driving innovation in ways we are just beginning to imagine.

FAQs

How does AI work for beginners?

AI is like an intelligent robot that learns from many examples to answer questions, make decisions, or create things based on what you tell it to do.

How do I start learning AI?

Can I use AI for free?

Why should I use AI?