Issue #36. What are the best specialized AI tools?

On today’s quest:

— My new favorite AI tool
— Give AI bad examples
— How to search Google without AI
— People are paying for GPT-4o
— Google Ngram tool in danger from AI
— Asking “Is it AI?”

A fabulous AI tool for proofing transcripts

If you listen to the Grammar Girl podcast, you may remember hearing that I’m taking an audiobook narration course. Well, through the course, I discovered an amazing AI tool for proofing audio against a script, and now I’m using it for the podcast too!

It’s called Pozotron, and it matches the audio to the transcript and shows you where they differ. It catches when I’ve said “nun” instead of “noun,” when I’ve accidentally edited a word out of the audio, or when I accidentally left in a double take, and it even makes a marker file to show exactly where the errors are in the audio file. It’s a massive time-saver.

Everyone can get a trial with one-hour of free processing time, but if you use my affiliate link, you get seven hours of free processing time. If you have any questions, just reply to the newsletter. I’m happy to tell you more; in fact, I love it so much I can’t shut up about it.

Try this at home: give bad examples

I often recommend Christopher Penn’s “Almost Timely” newsletter, and this week, he gave a great webinar about AI in podcasting for Libsyn (replay).

An especially useful tip from his talk is to not only give AI examples of good output you want, but also to give AI examples of bad output you don’t want.

For example, if you create a document you can upload with examples of past blog posts and good headlines for them, also create a clearly defined section with the type of headlines you wouldn’t want.

How to search Google without AI

Do you wish you could get old-school Google results? My online friend Ernie Smith of the Tedium blog made a landing page called &udm=14 that will let you do Google searches without the new AI Overviews at the top (and seemingly also without as many video results and ads). 

The name comes from a “web filter” code Google created that you can add to searches to limit results in this way. Ernie just made an easier way to use it.*

The helpful tool coincided with a rocky launch of Google’s new AI search summaries, which seemed at times to draw from “The Onion” and other such sites, recommending that people stare at the sun and add glue to pizza.**

People are actually paying for GPT-4o

Remember how I said in the last newsletter that I was thinking of canceling my ChatGPT Plus subscription because OpenAI made its newest model and many other features free?*** Well, it sounds like I was in the minority because they announced that revenue has almost doubled since the launch of GPT-4o. If you want to use 4o on the web, it’s free. But if you want to use it on your phone or get the desktop app, you have to pay, and it seems as if that has been enough to entice people to open their wallets. — TechCrunch 

Google Ngram results in danger from AI-generated books

404 Media reports, "Google Books is indexing low quality, AI-generated books that will turn up in search results, and could possibly impact Google Ngram viewer, an important tool used by researchers to track language use throughout history." (I used it a lot.)

To be clear, the article says AI-generated books are not currently factoring into Google Ngram results. The concern is that they could in the future.

Is it AI?

A sad thing I’ve noticed is that when I see an amazing photo or piece of art these days, my first thought is often “Is that AI?” What a bummer for all the photographers and artists in the world.

And a similar thing happened in the comments a few weeks ago when I posted about the crushing news that Dictionary.com has laid off it’s entire staff of lexicographers. Although there was no indication that the layoffs were AI-related, many people suggested the company probably thinks AI can do the lexicographers jobs. It does seem like a possible motivation, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if the owners simply think they can cruise by for years on the traffic they get from the decades of hard work already put into the site.

Or maybe they plan to pivot to word games. (Did you know people spend more time playing New York Times games than reading the company’s news?)

Finally, a piece by Maggie Appleton muses on what happens when you don’t ask “Is it AI?” now that generated works pretending to be by Monet, Van Gogh, William Morris, and more are showing up on Etsy.

Quick Hits

Duolingo expands AI tutor after seeing 54% increase in subscriptions. — WSJ

Art Directors Guild Suspends Training Program: “We Cannot in Good Conscience Encourage You to Pursue Our Profession.” — Indiewire

Cory Doctorow on AI art and copyright.

How Google Translate turns language into math … and back again. — WSJ YouTube

What AI apps do you like?

Keeping up with new AI tools is a challenge. So many of them seem worthless to me, but then I run across something amazing like Pozotron, and I wonder what else I’m missing.

If there’s an AI tool you love, reply to the newsletter, and I’ll include it in future newsletters.

What is AI sidequest?

Using AI isn’t my main job, and it probably isn’t yours either. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and Grammar Girl is my main gig, but I haven’t seen a technology this transformative since the development of the internet, and I want to learn about it. I bet you do too.

So here we are! Sidequesting together.

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend.

^{* I mean no shade by saying this is “just an easier way to use it.” User interfaces matter!}

** ^{Google just announced it’s scaling back the AI Overviews.}

^{*** I did cancel my subscription. We’ll see how it goes.}

^{Written by a human.}