Whenever AI comes up in conversation with creatives, eye muscles start to twitch. And that's not surprising. Most of us have lost work to generative AI over the last few years, and without going into details, that's definitely included me. But that doesn't mean I've discounted AI completely. In fact, quite the reverse.
The truth is, generative AI is only one type of AI. What's known as analytical AI can save you a ton of time and energy, without generating anything at all. I'm talking about tasks like sorting, scheduling, transcribing, searching; the kind of boring, routine work that you'd happily hand off to an intern, if you had one.
Of course, you have to be mega-careful. Just like most interns, AI isn't 100% accurate or reliable, and possibly never will be. You'll always have to double-check what it does, and often that means it's quicker to just do it all yourself.
However, through trial and error, I've found there are times when it's brilliant, and so I thought it might be helpful to share them in this article. While you might pursue a different creative discipline than me (I'm primarily a writer who takes photographs as part of my work), I hope you'll find some inspiration here for how to sharpen your AI skills.
01. Finding stuff in Google Drive
Ever since I went freelance in 2016, I've used Google's suite of free software, including Gmail, Google Drive and Google Sheets. You'd think, being Google, that it would be easy to search for stuff within these apps. But actually, over the years, I've wasted a lot of time trying – and typically failing – to do so.
All that's changed, though, since Google added an AI-powered search facility. I didn't even know this was a thing for a while; it's generally hiding in plain sight underneath one of those star/sparkle icons. Now, thankfully, I can ask it something in plain English, eg "I once wrote about a project by Simon Bray for Computer Arts magazine, I think it was 2020. Do I still have the PDF anywhere?"
In all honesty, this only works about 50 per cent of the time, and it often gets confused about what I'm looking for. But when it succeeds, it's by far the quickest way of unearthing information that would otherwise be buried in a landfill of digital documents.
02. Triaging my emails
I get around 200-300 emails a day, mostly from PRs, and that's a big drain on my time. In fact, I once calculated how long it would take to reply to all of them thoughtfully, and it turned out to be more hours than there were in an actual day. So some form of automation and triage has long been necessary to avoid me absolutely losing the plot.
Recently, I've found Spark Mail's smart inbox a big help. It sits on top of my Gmail account, and classifies email as it arrives, splitting it into Personal, Notifications and Newsletters. I can also toggle between emails I've dealt with and those I haven't looked at yet with a single keyboard shortcut. This helps me to get to the important emails faster and saves me time dealing with people who don't know or care what I do, and just want to spam my inbox.
I'm currently on the free plan, while there are paid plans with advanced features starting from $4.99 a month. In return, you can flag up priority contacts and vet new senders before they ever make it into your inbox (accept them, or block them outright). To be honest, I'm tempted by that. But so far, the free version alone has saved me a fair bit of time and stress.
03. Curating my photos
Ever taken hundreds of photos of the same thing, and then despaired as you tried to sift through them later? That used to take me an entire evening, and I didn't find it fun in the slightest. In fact, I'd usually end up with a headache.
Recently, I started using an AI tool called FilterPixel. It's got a bunch of handy features such as grouping together similar shots or pointing out where an image needs culling (it's out-of-focus, the subjects have their eyes closed, that kind of thing). When I can quickly whittle down your pictures like that, it's suddenly much easier and quicker to find the shots I actually want to use.
It's not perfect: sometimes I disagree with its judgements, and it often rejects images that are artistically interesting, just not technically perfect. But overall, it probably saves me a good hour of staring at a screen each time I use it.
One last thing: I was lucky enough to get a code to try this out as a journalist. Personally, I wouldn't pay the $14.99/mo it costs, but if photography's a big part of your work, and you spend a lot of time sifting through thousands of pics, it might well prove worth the money.
04. Transcribing meetings
As a writer, much of my work involves talking to people, either in formal interviews, meetings, or more casual chats. I always used to record these – with the person's permission, of course – and spent a lot of time transcribing them afterwards. Now, AI can do it for me in minutes, and Otter.ai is my tool of choice for that.
I like Otter because it's nice and flexible, offering me the choice of transcribing live or uploading recordings, and it's pretty accurate overall. That said, it struggles with non-Western names as well as technical jargon, so I usually have to skim-read everything carefully to double-check. And I'd certainly never add a direct quote into an article without listening back to the audio first.
If writing, researching or interviewing is part of your workflow, though, I reckon the $8.33/month I stump up for Otter is good value. If you only need to transcribe occasionally, meanwhile, the free plan includes 300 transcription minutes/month (max 30 mins per conversation), while if you need to upload files, then Turboscribe gives you three free uploads a day.
Key takeaway
I don't want to overstate any of this. None of these AI tools has changed the way I write or take photos. And if they vanished tomorrow, it wouldn't ruin my life or anything. But at the same time, I have to admit: they've certainly shaved significant time off my day by automating some of the most tedious, repetitive aspects of my work.
I tell you this, not because I'm a shill for the AI industry, nor because I want you to use any particular AI tool. But I'm willing to bet there's some aspect to your work that you either hate or find to be a massive time-suck.
In which case, I'd suggest you type into a chatbot like ChatGPT: "Is there a tool that can help me automate this?" and just see what it says. The rest is up to you.
