Real Information – Artificial Intelligence: Using AI in General
By Arthur Weiss
Editor’s note: This is part of a series covering what’s new and, more importantly, how infopreneurs can maximize the benefits of AI tools.
Over the last two years, AI has seemed to be taking over the world. Just looking at the most well-known generative AI product gives an idea. ChatGPT claims nearly 200 million visits per day with around 800 million weekly active users – roughly 10% of the world’s population. These numbers have doubled since February 2025, and ChatGPT now claims an 81% share of global traffic among AI chat tools. (See https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/ for more statistics.)
Although ChatGPT leads the pack, there are other products out there – and they differ in what they offer users. These include Gemini from Google, Copilot from Microsoft (built on ChatGPT), Claude from Anthropic, Perplexity, Llama, and DeepSeek … and that’s just the text-based generative AI tools. There are image and video creation tools such as Sora (from OpenAI), Veo (from Google), MidJourney, Invideo.io, and Synthesia. Other products include NotebookLM (Google), Elicit, Consensus – and many more. I’ll look at some of these in later posts. For now, let’s just consider types of applications where AI can help.
For infopreneurs, the primary uses of AI tend to be research, analysis, and perhaps content creation. Many of us have likely used AI to answer questions or summarize topics, and the results often appear much faster than those from a traditional Google search. Of course, you still need to verify the information – especially since AI can invent facts – a phenomenon known as “hallucination”! Check the sources, as some professionals have fallen afoul of good practice from not doing this – for example, the lawyer who cited non-existent legal cases as support for his position (see https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-hallucinations-court-papers-spell-trouble-lawyers-2025-02-18/ as one example).
AI may be used to write emails or even articles. The bane of university lecturers now is verifying whether student essays were written by AI, although software exists that identifies the likelihood that the text was AI-generated. Instead, use AI to proofread an article. Ask it to find spelling and grammar errors, and consider checking for accuracy or suggesting stylistic improvements. If authorship isn’t critical, you can use AI to craft specific messages – perhaps for a birthday card.
I’m not a poet – and certainly not a haiku expert. Including this in a birthday card could impress – it’s no worse than some of the doggerel one sees in commercial cards.
Candles softly glow,
laughter drifts through gentle hearts–
another year blooms.
AI can help in other areas: you may feed a complex report into the AI tool and ask for a summary with key points highlighted. Such applications can save a lot of time. I’d still recommend verifying the result, but it should help consolidate the content so that you know what to look for. I have used AI to write code/scripts, for instance, to scrape specific content from LinkedIn posts. (Yes – I know! You aren’t supposed to do that. But it was faster to ask the AI to look for what I needed than to scroll through multiple posts).
Another application is to ask the AI to translate material, printed or in other formats. I had a video that needed translation, but I didn’t even know the language. Both Gemini and Perplexity were quite happy to give me both a summary and a verbatim translation of what was being said – the video was in a mix of Urdu and Punjabi. (ChatGPT refused, saying I’d need to upload the audio file rather than the video – an example of how the AI tools differ in their capabilities).
However, my favourite application is also highly practical. I’m having friends for dinner and want to cook something special. Give the AI the ingredients you have and perhaps the time available, and it can generate recipes or meal plans, even if the ingredients are a complete hodgepodge. Cooking has never been easier – and you won’t find many of these recipes in standard cookbooks. (Earlier this year, I’d foraged Mirabelle plums. AI gave me a delicious recipe for Mirabelle plum chicken. Try finding recipes for hen-of-the-woods mushrooms in traditional cookbooks – AI is faster.)
Arthur Weiss has been an infopreneur for almost 30 years. He founded AWARE in 1995 after a career at the business information company Dun & Bradstreet. He specializes in competitive and marketing intelligence using open sources (OSINT). Recently, he has pivoted to new areas, including exploring how AI tools can support infopreneurs. His latest insights can be read in International Marketing & Competitive Intelligence and Computers in Libraries magazines. He may be contacted at a.weiss@aware.co.uk.
