ZD 24.12: The Best AI for Dad

Soft Kings need software assistants too.

🥃 The Distilled Spirit 🥃

📉 Behind the Vibcession: people in the US feel poorer.
😞 Not surprising: parents are not ok.
😊 At the same time the world is much richer.
📠 The fax machine meme revolution.
🔊 Irish tweens made a banger.

Automation is the gift for the discerning soft king.

Father’s Day AI Shopping Guide

Old guys rule! Father’s day is around the corner. Get the dad in your life the gift that keeps on giving! Give them AI platforms and tools! Keep him busy and happy! Here are some good options for the discerning dad or anyone else who wants AI tools:

Assistants

🌟ChatGPT is the choice for the man who just needs to have the latest and greatest. They are the market leader on the product side and have the new new. The platform stays shiny.

📰 If your dad looks up current events on ChatGPT and complains about hallucinations, get him Perplexity. It looks things up and shares sources and does a much better job at sticking to the truth.

📚 Claude is the choice for the man who like long reads. It’s superpower lies in the massive context window. It can handle Moby Dick.

🏢 For the hard working dad completely invested in his office suite get him Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini Advanced as appropriate. The proximity to his information will be helpful.

🍏❔ For the apple dad, this post was published a week before what should be a very AI focused WWDC. I would expect updates soon.

Multimedia

🎶 For music lovers and creatives and general you can’t go wrong with Suno. It is an AI tool that makes awesome songs upon request. The instrumental mode is even better for creating mood music for any occasion or presentation. It is, after all, the Summer of Suno.

🎬 Descript is an amazing tool to use with video. It is an AI-first video editing platform. Among other tricks it lets you edit videos using the transcript. Great tool for the video editing father in your life. He too can be a creator. Or easily edit that pile of family video collecting dust.

🖼 For image generation I’m not going to recommend anything in particular. I would just invest in one of the assistants. At this point they do all of that very well. Midjourney is great and I would recommend them once a user can create an image directly on the web from the get go. Discord is a bridge too far for many. Stability is cool but going down the tubes so it is hard to recommend them. Go with Dalle3 which is included with ChatGPT these days.

DIY AI

If the dad in your life is a tinkerer these recommendations are for you. These are great for the automation oriented:

💳 Platform credits — OpenAI’s platform is the leader here again. Works well with others, supported by lots of tools. Works well with things like . . .

⚡ Zapier is an automation platform that integrates with many things. Specifically, they are an OpenAI partner and the ChatGPT and other platform integrations are first rate. Get it for the dad that wants to add things to spreadsheets from his IoT thermometer too.

🤖Apify helps dad scrape web pages and applications like Twitter and YouTube to feed into things like Zapier to use the OpenAI credits you bought him to make his next million dollar idea work. It really is very, very useful and saves a ton of time. Very strongly recommended.

Other Pursuits

🧊 Summer drinking season is upon us! Rejoice! To get yourself in the mood for that G&T check out a two part history of the drink. If you are in DC, Barred in DC has a definitive list of DC Dive Bars to visit. Not quite the season yet, but next time you hear it remember that Jingle Bells is a drinking song written by a jerk.

✈ 80 years ago Americans figured out how to build 300,000 planes in five years. Do we overanalyze everything today?

⌨ Autocomplete was a Chinese invention. Emojis came out of Japanese memo software.

📢 Help the world be a saner place. Use the SIFT strategy to spot misinformation.