The best work lies at the intersection of human and Artificial Intelligence, or AI, contributions. A human and an AI playing chess collaboratively will always beat an AI or a human alone. So here’s some tools students are using today to get the busy work done or to create quality products.
Taking notes — Notion AI
Though the AI feature of Notion is behind a subscription-based paywall after the first 20 uses, its capabilities provide a companion for students taking notes in class and certainly lessen the consequences of spacing out during class. The “use AI to finish what you started” feature enables Notion to generate any missing notes and edits. It also polishes and organizes students’ thoughts.
Summarizing videos in seconds — Summarize.tech
Students who need to get information from a video quickly can turn to summarize.tech for help. This tool takes a video and transcribes it within seconds. It can even recognize who is speaking and categorize who said what. Its accuracy is still improving, but it could be helpful if a student wanted the key takeaways or a summary of content.
Creating a polished slideshow within minutes — Beautiful.ai
Students are now using Beautful.ai to craft presentations. The “Design Bot” feature of this tool creates slides or even entire slideshows based on a written prompt from students.
Creating eye-catching images within seconds — Adobe Firefly
Now having the ability to draw inspiration from Firefly for their digital art, students can also use it to edit to “fill in” or “extend” photos (filling in the areas around the photo to increase its size with generated content), to remove or add things or people to photos and to generate photos of various themes, such as “cyberpunk,” “old fashioned,” “realistic” and more.
Complex calculations within seconds — Wolfram Alpha (or rather the ChatGPT Wolfram Plugin)
Wolfram’s learning curve is steep as it can require programming to perform more advanced tasks. However, the new collaboration between OpenAI and Wolfram has enabled ChatGPT to interact with Wolfram via a plugin feature for paid users. Students tell ChatGPT what to do with Wolfram, and it translates their English into Wolfram code and outputs the result directly from Wolfram.
Pretty much everything else — ChatGPT/Bard
Though less accurate than Wolfram, ChatGPT and its Google equivalent, Bard, are generally great consultation tools for a quick second opinion and for carrying out tedious tasks like writing a cover letter or consolidating resources.
Remember that an AI and a human working together will produce a stronger output than either could alone. However, students will need to remain vigilant and use AI as a tool rather than a crutch. It is essential for students to memorize and retain concepts and information on their own as well, because it helps them make connections faster (and in turn feed AI more comprehensive prompts). As such, AI will only amplify a student’s abilities. Knowing now that it is easier than ever before to get involved with AI and improve both team and individual workflow, give it a shot!