🚀 My AI Favorites this Year
Tools that transformed my 2024 workflow
Total reading time around 4 minutes.
Welcome to Visually AI!
🌠 My Top 5 AI Tools of 2024
This has been an eventful year in generative AI and I thought about the products and updates that impacted me the most.
ChatGPT
I’ve been using ChatGPT since the day after it launched in 2022, but I used it even more this year for researching, planning, and content creation.
Vision: I drop images, screenshots, and handwritten notes for analysis, ideas, captions, etc.
Desktop app: I like the option to screenshot from the desktop app and the ability for ChatGPT to see my Terminal screen for coding assistance.
Searchable chats & Memory: This is extremely important to find old chats using a word or phrase. ChatGPT updating its memory with information from chats makes it easier to get consistent answers without repeating details from previous conversations.
Web search: I use this frequently to summarize or explain topics online.
Claude
I upgraded to Claude’s Pro plan when they introduced Projects to fill with knowledge about certain topics and custom prompts. I use this daily for different topics, such as AI video prompts.
Claude’s Artifacts are wonderful for visualizing information and concepts, or creating small apps, similar to GPTs with a visual perspective.
Here’s an example of a chat where Claude helped me understand how to use FLUX Tools’ depth map images to create multi-layered motion in image to video prompts:
Magnific
Magnific has become a huge part of my workflow to upscale and creatively enhance images before posting or animation.
New features introduced this year included Style Transfer and Relighting. It is incredible how much it can transform a great image by adding or refining subtle details which improves the quality of image to video generations.
FLUX
Black Forest Labs launched FLUX.1 open source in August and it was the first real alternative / competitor to Midjourney, in my opinion.
FLUX is not available on its own platform, but it is now widely available on developer platforms (Fal, Replicate) and just about any website or app that has image generation, including Leonardo, Krea, Freepik, and more. It is highly customizable, has excellent prompt adherence, and able to render text and fine details.
Suddenly, we were able to achieve character and product consistency by fine-tuning FLUX LoRA models with training images of the desired face or product.
AI Video
OpenAI announced Sora last year but it wasn’t available to the public until recently. Sora gave us a glimpse of the future of text to video and image to video, but several other models actually delivered those results sooner.
Runway’s Gen-3, Kling AI, Hailuo MiniMax, Luma Dream Machine, and Pika 2.0 made it possible to generate longer, high-quality videos with simple to extremely detailed prompts. Sora isn’t even in the top 3 rankings (based on my observations of the response online and my own experience), and there are more models launching weekly, such as Google’s Veo 2, Hunyuan Video, and Mochi 1.
There are several widely available options to choose from to get impressive results.
I used the same Midjourney image with a text prompt in this comparison:
Recap
The biggest impact on my work has been the ability to do so much more in the same amount of time, with these tools.
I worked full-time in healthcare until September, but I was able to launch a YouTube channel, build profiles on multiple social media platforms, and collaborate on sponsored projects.
I am looking forward to streamlining my workflow even more in 2025!
🛠️ This Week’s AI Tools (My 2024 favorites)
This is a quick list of some of my favorite tools:
Canva: All-purpose visual content creation platform with hundreds of useful app integrations and features. (link)
Screen Studio: My go-to screen recording app for macOS. (link)
Cleanshot X: My favorite screenshot tool with several annotation features. (link)
CapCut: Video editor with a wide range of free tools and features anyone can use to make high-quality videos on mobile, online, and desktop. (link)
Read AI: AI copilot for meetings with video recording, live transcripts, meeting playback with highlights, and more. (link)
Hunch: Multi-modal AI platform with templates, tools, and dozens of AI models to choose from. (link)
Descript: Excellent video / screen-recording with easy-to-use editing features and generative AI tools for content creation. (link)
Oasis app: Transforms voice notes into multiple types of content on mobile or web. (link)
Udio / Suno: Text to music with a range of features on both platforms. (Udio link) (Suno link)
Gamma: Create presentation decks, websites, or documents with customizable cards, image generation, and more - in seconds. (link)
Napkin AI: Quickly visualize text, concepts, or ideas with customizable flowcharts, diagrams, and images. (link)
🖼️ Image Prompts
Prompt: Instagram posts, everyday life
Prompt: A cinematic overhead shot of a woman’s bare shoulders in a golden hour field, dusting her collarbone with a luminous powder that catches every ray of light.
🎥 Video Prompt
Prompt: POV goldfish swimming in its bowl looking at the humans outside
Generated with Google Veo 2:
Thank you for reading.
Have a creative week!
Thanks for putting the video comparison together, that must have taken a lot of work!
Amazing times ahead...