Wonder Tools: Useful tips for creative productivity

Connect Your Tools to AI 🔗 I’ve changed how I use Claude and ChatGPT lately. They’ve become my digital dashboards, linked to many of the tools I rely on. 🧠 A Guide to Thinking With AI To avoid the temptation to outsource my thinking to AI, I’m pushing in the opposite direction. Here's how I'm approaching this challenge. 🔒 How to Use AI Privately for Free ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude aren’t your only AI options. To use AI securely, download local AI tools that run on your computer privately for free.

My friend and colleague Mallary Tenore Tarpley writes an excellent newsletter, Write at the Edge, with helpful writing tips and best practices. She’s a professor, journalist, and author who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other outlets. She recently published an important debut book, Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery. Mallary recently interviewed me about writing tools. She wrote up a summary of our conversation, highlighting the tools I talked about.

I’ve always admired the way bestselling author A.J. Jacobsturns his life into a laboratory for testing quirky ideas. He’s written books about following every biblical law for a year, reading each entry in the encyclopedia, and thanking a thousand people responsible for his morning coffee. I consider it immersion journalism. He calls himself a human guinea pig. So I was delighted to meet A.J. at a recent Substack event.

I’ve changed how I use Claudeand ChatGPT lately. They’ve become my digital dashboards, linked to many of the tools I rely on. I can ask Claude to add to my calendar, query my meeting notes, update me on my email, or find a passage I highlighted in my digital notebook. Claude Connectors and ChatGPT plugins connect to hundreds of services. These include Superhuman Mail for email, Google Calendar, Granola for meeting notes, and Readwise for my online highlights.

Today’s tools help you track a topic with digital scouts, figure out where an image came from, and search like a pro without memorizing operators. This is a guest post from Craig Silverman, following up on his Digital Investigator’s Toolkit.Craig and Alexios Mantzarlis run Indicator, which publishes digital investigative guides and tools. They also have a free newsletter. Use it to: get an agent-curated summary of new info about a topic you care about, delivered on your schedule.

My brain’s nearly melting in this week’s 100-degree heat wave. To avoid the temptation to outsource my thinking to AI, I’m pushing in the opposite direction. How can I use AI to challenge me to think more, not less? Read on for five tactics I’m leaning on to avoid cognitive surrender when my brain’s overheating. Don’t let your AI flatter you. Get it to challenge you. I conceived of these images and generated them with ChatGPT. The Tactic: Use AI as an intellectual sparring partner.

Jan and other free AI tools offer private, offline, subscription-free alternatives to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude aren’t your only AI options. To use AI privately for free, you can download local AI tools that run on your computer, not online. You can use them without a subscription, avoiding the risk of having sensitive info ingested into a large language model.

I’m inviting my most helpful colleagues to share useful tools and insights. Craig Silverman, who wrote today’s post, is one of the sharpest researchers I know. He and Alexios Mantzarlis are building a sharp new publication, Indicator, especially worth following if you’re interested in digital deception. - Jeremy Craig: We’re all trying to make sense of a chaotic information environment awash in synthetic fakes, sophisticated scams, undisclosed ads, and unverified claims.

Old sites are now digital dust. I generated this image w/ memories + ChatGPT. I like remembering the good ol’ days of Internet 1.0. Some of my defunct early favorites: Sixdegrees was my first taste of a social network way back in 1997. I loved finding friends. The web felt like magic. Friendster, launched before Facebook, was fun. It peaked at 115 million users and a $53 million valuation.

I use Pinpoint to store and analyze huge collections of documents, scans, and multimedia. I prompted ChatGPT to generate illustrations for this post. Google’s Pinpoint is now open to everyone. It’s a surprisingly powerful free tool for making sense of giant piles of digital stuff. (Before June 3, it was restricted to journalists and academics). Read on to learn more about creative ways to use Pinpoint; its new AI features and their limitations; and how Pinpoint differs from NotebookLM.