7 surprising things you didn’t know you could do with AI

When most people think of generative AI, their thoughts immediately jump to popular AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot — all of which do basically the same sorts of generative things, just wearing different hats.

In reality, AI is capable of so much more than simply regurgitating text, images, and computer code. A new surge of AI tools is enabling all sorts of things you may not have thought possible before. This list could be much longer, but to give you a taste of how broad AI is reaching, here are seven surprising tasks that generative AI can help you accomplish.

Build an online brand

Whether you’re an aspiring writer or the next Hawk Tuah girl, having a recognizable personal brand is essential in today’s media landscape. But if you don’t have the time and money to devote to hiring dedicated designers, artists, and agents to help build your brand and spread its online presence, numerous generative AI tools are available in their stead.

Looka, for example, ideal for generating branded content. You simply fill out a questionnaire about your preferred style and tone, then the system generates the brand assets, like logos, banners, business cards, and social media kits. Those assets can then be further edited, leveraging the power of AI, in the likes of Canva’s Magic Studio. The online graphic design platform is generally free to use (and immensely capable regardless of how much you pay), but if you want to take advantage of more advanced AI tools like Dream Lab, Magic Resize, Highlights, and Enhance Voice, you’ll need to spring for the $20/month Pro subscription tier.

It doesn’t matter how snappy your business cards are if nobody can find your content online. AI tools like FeedHive are a boon for ginning up user interaction, allowing you to repurpose your old posts, re-angling and refocusing them to meet current trends and events. Ocoya, on the other hand, combines AI-driven social media scheduling with an AI copywriter, enabling you to generate and schedule a month’s worth of social media posts in minutes.

Hootsuite offers unparalleled management of your social media marketing, allowing you to see how your posts performed across platforms and provide analysis along myriad individual metrics. Combined with its OwlyWriter text generator and the ability to answer DMs from all of your platforms in a single window, Hootsuite serves as a one-stop shop for social media management.

Sound like someone famous

Generative AI doesn’t just output visual media. The technology is becoming increasingly competent at audio generation, especially voice cloning, as well. Services like ElevenLabs offer a host of text-to-speech features that allow you to translate your talking points into different languages in real time, or have celebrities of yesteryear like Burt Reynolds, Judy Garland, and James Dean read PDFs to you during your morning commute.

Respeecher takes it a step further, allowing you to clone your voice as that of a celeb’s. Its audio generation model takes your spoken dialog then overlays the dulcet tones of Chris Farley or another licensed actor. The end result is your words seamlessly spoken in the celebrity’s voice.

Brush your teeth

The latest generation of smart electric toothbrushes have incorporated limited AIs into their services. First introduced by French device maker Kolibree at CES 2017, AI-enhanced toothbrushes have grown rapidly in popularity (and price, with some smart brushes retailing for more than $100). They’re designed to leverage a low-power onboard processing unit running deep learning algorithms using an accelerometer to measure how often, hard, and fast you’re scrubbing your teeth.

With that data, often synced to your associated smartphone apps (and then up into the cloud), the AI can establish a sense of your oral hygiene routine and generate suggestions on how to improve your technique to more effectively stave off plaque, tooth decay, and gingivitis. Their apps can also provide a map of the inside of your mouth to show which teeth your brushing strokes most often miss so you can redirect your scrubbing efforts.

You can currently find AI-enhanced smart brushes from brands like Oral-B, Philips, and Oclean. There isn’t a whole lot of data published on whether your toothbrush really needs an AI assistant and whether it does a better long-term job of cleaning compared to a standard electric model, so make sure to take manufactures’ claims of this being The Way of the Future™ with a grain of salt.

Find a job

In today’s chaotic job market, folks seeking employment need every advantage they can get. If you haven’t updated your resume in a few years, you obviously don’t work in media (*rimshot*). Seriously though, why beat your head against your keyboard trying to perfectly phrase the position responsibilities for a job you held three gigs ago when you can get an AI resume writer like KickResume, Teal, or Resume Worded to do the initial heavy lifting for you? Obviously, you’re going to want to check its output for accuracy but at least now you have a good place to start.

The same goes for writing cover letters. Don’t debase yourself by actually writing a note begging to be even considered for a position that would be lucky to have you. It’s not like hiring managers actually read them anyway, so have a bot like CoverDoc.ai whip something up instead.

Predict the weather

Used to be that if you wanted to know what the weather looked like, you’d have to stick your head out a window. Weather forecasting took a monumental leap forward in 1992 when the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) introduced the ENS 15-day forecast system, which is still considered a world leader today. However, a newly released AI model from Google’s DeepMind division, dubbed GenCast, has shown it can outperform the ENS system’s performance and accuracy by a 20% margin.

Trained on 40 years of historic data generated between 1979 and 2018 — including wind speed, temperature, pressure, and humidity at various altitudes — GenCast proved to be more accurate over a 15-day forecast period than ENS, for both daily weather patterns and extreme events. It also offered superior performance in predicting the paths of hurricanes and cyclones. While you won’t be able to use GenCast for yourself, everybody will soon enjoy its predictive benefits.

GenCast is slated to begin augmenting the existing forecast systems in the near term. Rather than outright replace them, GenCast is expected to help improve accuracy in predicting cold snaps and heat waves, as well as gauging the severity of high-wind events.

Develop your own perfume

This one might sound niche, but it’s a good example of how AI is changing very specific industries and workflows. In addition to helping researchers discover lifesaving drug and protein structures, AI systems like Carto have made tremendous leaps in ensuring that their human users smell nice. Conventional methods of creating a new scent for a client can require hundreds of people working in concert, selecting and blending fragrances from a palette of 1,000 to 2,000 options.

Carto, which has been likened to “the ChatGPT of Fragrance,” can consider up to 5,000 fragrances from its “Odour Value Map” and immediately generate samples of new scents with the help of a separate robot. These aren’t market-ready scents, mind you, but instead help perfumers rapidly iterate on new ideas, themes, and client feedback.

Redecorate your house

If you’re moving into a new place or are bored with the home you already have, AI can help you visualize a new look. Generative tools like HomeVisualizerAI can help. This app takes your reference image, along with your text prompt describing the room’s new vibe, and generates an image of what that would look like.

The AI also offers a “style fashion” feature that overlays popular home decor motifs from Pinterest onto your reference image and leverages Google Lens to help you shop for items in the render. You can try three renders for free before the $12/month subscription kicks in.

These are just a few of the myriad applications that generative AI can assist with. As the technology continues to mature, especially as AI agents become more prevalent, their capacity to help will only increase.