5 surprising ways to use AI

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools , a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. I like pushing AI to be less predictable . When AI assistants are less bland and more bold, they challenge my blind spots and nudge me to rethink. So I asked one of the boldest AI experimenters I know, Alexandra Samuel , to share unconventional tips and tactics when she visited New York recently from Vancouver. Alex, who writes about AI for The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review , surprised me with the scale of her AI efforts. She described creating 200-plus automation scripts and building a personal idea database that helps with drafting pitch emails. Her quirkiest tactic? Using Suno to generate songs to explain complex concepts. Her lively new podcast , Me + Viv , explores her unusual relationship with an AI assistant she trained to serve as her coach and collaborator. She interviews AI skeptics like Oliver Burkeman and Karen Hao to challenge her own embrace of AI. The Suno songs Alex generated serve as a recurring musical thread throughout the series. In a recent episode, “ I’m So Sycophantic ,” Alex confronts Viv’s most irritating flaw: her pathological tendency to flatter Alex and agree with everything she says. The show’s intriguing premise reminded me of another podcast I love, Evan Ratliff’s Shell Game , whose second season debuted recently. Both are excellent explorations of what it’s like to engage deeply with AI assistants, resourceful and flawed as they are. Five tips from Alex 1. Use Suno to turn words into catch music. What Suno is: An AI music generation platform for creating custom songs Alex uses Suno extensively to create songs for her podcast about AI, treating it as a storytelling tool rather than just music creation. “I’m like a monkey with a slot machine. It’s pretty typical for me to generate the same song 50 or 100 times, maybe even 200 times,” she says. The iterative process helps her find the perfect version. She says Suno struggles with switching between male and female voices, musical styles, or languages mid-song. Alex suggests bringing your own lyrics to Suno for better results than relying on its built-in lyric generation. Here’s documentation she wrote up about how she uses Suno. An alternative she recommends: Work iteratively with an AI assistant like Claude to develop lyrics that you then import into Suno. Try it for: Turning articles or announcements into short promo songs; creating engaging musical explainers; or generating a newsletter signup song Alternatives: Udio , ElevenLabs Music 2. Coda : Create your own productivity hub What Coda is: A software tool for creating customized documents and databases. I’ve written about how underrated Coda is as an alternative to other useful tools like Notion and Airtable. Alex calls Coda an everything hub where you can build your own tools. New AI features make it easier to use and more flexible. Alex used Coda to design...

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