While productivity tools and search prompts can be applied to many use cases, the current AI landscape for creators leaves us with the best idea of what common AI uses will look like in the future for everyone online. The tools creators are taking advantage of may be specific to their needs today, but mirror the needs and opportunities of regular netizens.
From a journalistic point of view, my experience with AI was narrowed on productivity tools, like calendars, transcription tools, scrapers that might help me find public data faster. These are useful in a large corporate landscape. On the other side of the coin, citizens might play with filters that add Ghostface to their Halloween photo to personalize their holiday photos. But when we’re talking about entrepreneurs who build their brand on authenticity, and build it from scratch away from a national brand, there’s a middle layer of AI uses that more closely resemble long-term tools we’ll see more of soon.
1. “Google Zero” is an opportunity for new creators to earn space on the front of search.
Brands that have earned top placement in Google and other search engines have been working on that for years, through expertise, taxonomy, legacy of brand and domain and web teams that can help them build out continuous changes that make search engines happy. Others use paid marketing to hop to the top.
But with many sources of information barring AI scrapers from using their information as training material or sources, scraping tools are looking to open platforms and content to source their information. This means a cocktail blogger who could never make it to the top of Google because New York Times Cooking sat in those spots could suddenly become the top linked source in an Old Fashioned recipe in Gemini.
A real life example of this: A friend who is an entertainer just had a sold-out run of her show for the first time. She’d been working on her search placement for years, unable to crack aggregators that had listings reaching the top of the search queries. However, Gemini lists her as a top performer in the area, and suddenly her website is getting attention it did not see with search.
2. Your image is for sale.
A recurring nightmare in major corporations is a deep fake image of a top executive appearing in a viral video exhibiting bad behavior. But for some entrepreneurs who are stretched to their limit as an individual personality, selling their image is an option.
Major personalities like Jake Paul are licensing their image to be used in AI tools for the creation of videos, allowing them to appear in more places than they’d be able to film on their own. And even unknown actors are selling their likeness to be used as AI avatars in advertising, like stock image video.
While this opens an entire menu of problems, it won’t be long until regular people are asked to sell their image to appear as avatars in commercials, or to make their own commercials advocating for a brand they like; think about all of the email requests you receive to rate an item after you shop online.
3. Creating a personalized language model can add formats to a creators portfolio that they didn’t have previously.
Text-based creators who have never written a broadcast script before can input their links into an AI sandbox and essentially create their own LLM. An LLM, or large language model, looks at the words someone uses and the relationships between the words to create a dictionary, and within a sandbox (aka, a closed environment) a creator would develop AI prompts that answer in their own voice.
The Sophiana app draws on this. Developed by creator Sophia Smith Galer, the app pulls from your written work to make a text script you can read while creating a video. It’s a great training program for understanding new formats, and for using source material you trust when experimenting with visuals. While the app also draws on Galer’s experience going viral to help you develop a rubric that focuses on engaging audiences, this style of text-to-video writing could be developed through personalized language models for anyone in the future: work email rubrics, holiday card rubrics and responding to difficult family members could be next.
So, tell us: Do you see similar uses of AI in your daily life?