AI makes anything you can imagine possible. You can use AI tools for professional reasons or just for fun, but many of the features of AI are gimmicks and not worth your time. Whether you’re designing visual content or creating creative text, these tools provide instant solutions to challenges that used to take hours of work. Here are my favorite real-world uses for creative AI tools that anyone can use. Check out the signs that AI is already in high gear.
1. Product and model photography
If you sell graphic T-shirts or other apparel, using AI to create apparel mockups can save you time and money, especially if you ship direct to customers or don’t have the means to pre-purchase inventory to photograph. While AI can’t produce branded results, generic elements are often enough for useful mockups.
There are also tools that provide product photography backgrounds if you are shooting products but don’t have suitable backgrounds. While designing and photographing products is easy in the right setting, you may not be able to achieve the setting you want. AI tools like Flair or Kittl Choose a backdrop to suit your product photo. Check out the best lighting equipment available for an amazing photography experience.
2. Remove objects smoothly
Using the clone tool in Photoshop or any other application is a simple way to remove unwanted objects from your photos, but it takes time and precision. Depending on the complexity of what you need to remove, it can be frustrating and sometimes impossible to get right.
Generative AI has taken object removal to the next level, and is implemented in most applications. Photoshop has Generative Fill, Canva has Magic Edit, Luminar Neo has GenSwap — but there are countless other applications with similar AI tools.
Using generative AI to remove and replace distractions is faster and often more successful than doing it yourself with a selection tool or cloning tools. Generative AI lets you remove distractions — like tourists in your vacation photos or your brother making the peace sign in a serious family photo — so you can share and proudly display your photos.
3. Coloring Books
If you're trying to entertain your child, or you're a child yourself, coloring is a great way to pass the time and relax your mind. You may feel overwhelmed when buying a coloring book because of the many blank pages, or you may not have found a book that suits your interests.
Using generative AI and text-to-image tools, you can create your own font illustrations to print and color at home.
While there are many apps you can use, I used Canva and the built-in Magic Media tool. My method of choice was Doodle (found in Graphics), which provides a sketch of the message I created. I made some coloring pages for my seven-year-old niece, and the best part about doing so was being able to involve her in the process.
I told my niece she could color anything she could imagine, so we came up with a hot dog message using Canva’s text to image converter. I then added additional text using Canva’s Universal Text feature, allowing us to have a completely custom image to print at home and color. Check out How to Turn Your Photos into Color-By-Numbers Templates: Best Free Websites.
4. Generate ideas
AI-powered chatbots — like ChatGPT — are being integrated into almost every application these days. While I’m not advocating using AI to write your professional or educational papers, it can be a great part of your idea generation workflow.
AI chatbots can help you brainstorm ideas, research topics, and trending data, or be a quick way to provide information before you have to fact-check it yourself. You can also use AI chatbots to generate ideas for non-writing projects, such as design research, video topics, or learning new technical techniques. You can use an AI chatbot in much the same way you would use a Google search engine to get quick results. Check out our roundup of the top chatbots that help solve common everyday challenges.
5. Helpful pictures and illustrations
While I often dislike the cheesy side of using AI, creating useful images or illustrations can be fun — even if it's a trick, really.
I don't advocate using AI image generators to completely replace original art, but it can be fun to turn your dog into a cartoon, your parents into a 3D clay model, or even see what you might look like in high school pictures at your current age. Photo A great tool to create fun avatars and illustrations of yourself, your friends or family.
6. Recover old photos
Finding old family photos can be a fun trip down memory lane, but sometimes they are old, torn, worn, and have seen better days. Furthermore, any film photos from before the 1970s are often in black and white or sepia tones, making it difficult to picture the people in the frame as the family they once were and might be related to.
Using AI tools, you can restore these photos and help you transform worn or discolored photos into modern family photos, with eye colors that you can match to your own and hair colors that make you realize that family ties have been lost over time.
7. Enhance image quality with artificial intelligence
Even with the technology our smartphones and cameras now provide, sometimes your photos don’t come out high enough, especially when you resize them to be larger than their default dimensions. Pixel distortion can occur in raster images when they are stretched to a size larger than their megapixels allow.
While you can easily resize images in Photoshop or any app, there is still a limit to how much quality you can tolerate. Using AI image upscaling tools provides quick and easy ways to increase the quality of your image when you need to resize your image.
You can find AI image upscaling tools in many creative and AI-based apps; however, most of them are locked behind paywalls or subscription packages. Pixlr It is a browser-based tool that offers AI Super Scale feature for free.
8. Create short videos
Creating short videos for my various social media accounts can be a bit overwhelming at times. Although I know my way around video editing apps, when I’m making videos just for fun, I don’t like to spend a lot of time on them. I found help from a couple of places and their AI tools for short videos.
It contains Adobe Express TikTok Symphony has a built-in assistant — the same tool is officially on TikTok — where I can ask its AI to share trending topics or video ideas for my target keywords, and it provides sample videos for me to take inspiration from. TikTok Symphony is trained on TikTok’s algorithm, and while I don’t use TikTok personally, the information is useful for any type of short-form video. Check out why I still use TikTok despite its bad reputation.
CapCut is great for creating short videos, even without AI. The built-in smart ads tool and smart templates have been my go-to tools when I don’t want to spend time and energy editing my footage to fit a beat, narrative, or story. It does everything for me, and still lets me tweak the results if they’re not quite right. Check out our comparison of CapCut’s free and paid versions: Is a subscription worth the cost?
I’m always excited to try out new AI features and tools, but I’m often disappointed with the results or can’t think of a reason to use them other than for fun. Anyone who looks past the gimmicks and wants a real purpose for AI can and should use the list of tools above. They can be useful, save time, and produce great results for things you might spend a lot of time or money creating yourself. AI is still fun and useful, with real-world uses. Now check out Can Built-In AI Tools Outperform Traditional Design Apps?
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