This text is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a publication that helps you uncover essentially the most helpful websites and apps.
I like pushing AI to be less predictable. When AI assistants are much less bland and extra daring, they problem my blind spots and nudge me to rethink.
So I requested one of many boldest AI experimenters I do know, Alexandra Samuel, to share unconventional suggestions and techniques when she visited New York just lately from Vancouver.
Alex, who writes about AI for The Wall Road Journal and Harvard Enterprise Overview, shocked me with the size of her AI efforts. She described creating 200-plus automation scripts and constructing a private thought database that helps with drafting pitch emails. Her quirkiest tactic? Utilizing Suno to generate songs to elucidate advanced ideas.
Her energetic new podcast, Me + Viv, explores her uncommon relationship with an AI assistant she educated to function her coach and collaborator. She interviews AI skeptics like Oliver Burkeman and Karen Hao to problem her personal embrace of AI. The Suno songs Alex generated function a recurring musical thread all through the collection.
In a latest episode, “I’m So Sycophantic,” Alex confronts Viv’s most irritating flaw: her pathological tendency to flatter Alex and agree with every little thing she says.
The present’s intriguing premise jogged my memory of one other podcast I like, Evan Ratliff’s Shell Game, whose second season debuted just lately. Each are glorious explorations of what it’s like to interact deeply with AI assistants, resourceful and flawed as they’re.
5 suggestions from Alex
1. Use Suno to show phrases into catch music.
What Suno is: An AI music era platform for creating customized songs
Alex makes use of Suno extensively to create songs for her podcast about AI, treating it as a storytelling device relatively than simply music creation.
“I’m like a monkey with a slot machine. It’s fairly typical for me to generate the identical track 50 or 100 instances, perhaps even 200 instances,” she says.
The iterative course of helps her discover the proper model. She says Suno struggles with switching between female and male voices, musical types, or languages mid-song. Alex suggests bringing your individual lyrics to Suno for higher outcomes than counting on its built-in lyric era. Right here’s documentation she wrote up about how she makes use of Suno.
Another she recommends: Work iteratively with an AI assistant like Claude to develop lyrics that you simply then import into Suno.
Attempt it for: Turning articles or bulletins into quick promo songs; creating partaking musical explainers; or producing a publication signup track
Options: Udio, ElevenLabs Music
2. Coda: Create your individual productivity hub
What Coda is: A software program device for creating custom-made paperwork and databases. I’ve written about how underrated Coda is as a substitute for different helpful instruments like Notion and Airtable.
Alex calls Coda an every little thing hub the place you possibly can construct your individual instruments. New AI options make it simpler to make use of and extra versatile. Alex used Coda to design her personal “pitch machine,” a classy story monitoring system.
She has one desk within the pitch machine with all of her story concepts. One other desk in Coda has all of the publications she writes for, with editors’ names and phone information.
With the press of a button in Coda, she will mix a number of story pitches right into a single Gmail draft whereas robotically updating monitoring fields and follow-up dates. It took some time to arrange, however now it saves her time.
Who’s Coda for? Alex recommends Coda for energy customers who like messing round with tech. She provides this check: “In the event you use XLOOKUP in Excel, then it’s best to use Coda. In the event you don’t know XLOOKUP, it’s best to use Notion. It’s like a nerd-o-meter.”
Attempt it for: Challenge and marketing campaign thought monitoring, managing a consumer database, or automated e mail or Slack message era
Options: Notion, Airtable, Google Workspace, Obsidian
3. CapCut: Create social movies with AI assist
What it’s: A video modifying platform with AI options
Alex makes use of CapCut, together with customized Python scripts, to create music movies for Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. She says she has combined emotions about CapCut due to its TikTok/ByteDance possession, however depends on it for now. She’s been engaged on a system for syncing the looks of captions on-screen to the second when track lyrics are heard.
Attempt it for: Creating fashionable, captioned social media movies or turning podcasts into movies
Options: Captions, Descript, or Kapwing
4. Claude + MCP: Join AI to your docs
What it’s: An AI assistant related to exterior databases and instruments through Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP)
MCP servers allow you to join websites and apps to AI platforms. That’s how Alex related her Coda account to Claude.
Now that they’re linked, Alex can pose informal inquiries to Claude, which may then search for issues in her Coda docs.
“I can really simply have a dialog with Claude and say, ‘Hey Claude, I simply talked to an editor. They’re on the lookout for articles about knowledge privateness. Are you able to take a look at my Coda doc and see what story concepts I’ve that may be related?’”
She emphasizes safety concerns: Journalists overlaying delicate topics ought to keep away from the sort of experimental workflow in the event that they’re defending nameless supply data.
Attempt it for: Querying advanced databases, discovering related previous work for brand new initiatives, analyzing patterns throughout your individual paperwork, combining a number of knowledge sources for insights
Options: The Google Drive connector in Claude or ChatGPT; or a customized setup of NotebookLM
5. Claude Code: Cut back repetitive work
What it’s: An AI-powered coding assistant that runs regionally in your pc. It helps builders code quicker. It additionally helps nonprogrammers accomplish technical duties utilizing pure language prompts. You need to use it to prepare information in your laptop computer, create Python scripts, or make little interactive purposes or video games.
Regardless of restricted formal programming coaching, Alex has written roughly 200 Python scripts utilizing Claude Code.
She says, “Everytime you hear your self with the deep sigh of, like, That is gonna be a drag, simply go to the AI and say, ‘Hey, right here’s this factor I’ve to do. Is there a means that could possibly be made right into a script?’”
Alex’s scripts have helped her mix PDFs and generate time-coded captions for video. She additionally used Claude Code to construct her personal Firefox extension for a monetary monitoring app.
Attempt it for: Batch file processing, changing knowledge, or whipping up browser extensions to resolve specific-to-you issues
Options: Replit, Cursor, Claude Artifacts, Windsurf
This text is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a publication that helps you uncover essentially the most helpful websites and apps.
