Generative AI for Regens: A Beginner's Guide 🌱

Created with Midjourney.

I know you’ve heard the words “Gen AI” literally everywhere. But what does it mean? Let me start from ancient history — well, a couple of years ago.

We had this old AI that technical people called machine learning (ML). It ran a bunch of things like the Facebook feed, Google Ads, and stuff that mattered to us. While it was great and all, it couldn’t do things we humans easily do — like write a book, create music, make a movie, draw, read instructions and do a task, see a picture and describe it. All of this is stuff only humans can do. Crazy, right? Nothing else on the planet can do these things. It’s like our thing.

Then AI came along — or Gen AI as it’s currently known. We sort of have two types: large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. These totally changed the game. They can do all the stuff we can.

These models can see and understand the world around us and react to it like we do. Sure, most of us are smarter and probably do a better job than AI — but that’s not always the case. Personally, I can’t make a better song or draw a better picture than AI. Even with something as simple as reading, AI can read a whole book in seconds and tell you where the mistakes are and how to fix them. I don’t know another human who can do that.

Chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude are LLMs trained on all of humanity’s knowledge — or at least a big part of it. Chatbots are an application of LLMs and a great way to interact with them, but there are other uses where LLMs are running inside companies, helping them process customer support requests and the like.

I’ve been an early user of this magical technology, using text-to-image AI models even before ChatGPT arrived. Also — I’ve been working in the social impact space for over a decade, so I’m aware of the constraints we work under. This is why I’m really excited about Gen AI. It’s the best thing to happen to changemakers. It gives us superpowers to do more with very little, and gives us the freedom of time to focus on real work.

Must-have GenAI toolkit for regens

Chatbots. For simple tasks, advice, ideation, or just as a smart companion — chatbots are great. Consider them an extension of your brain. You can consult on any subject, ask the bot to edit your emails, reports, summarize documents, suggest headlines, help you craft a content strategy, do multiple language translations. The use cases are limitless. Chatbots are great for simple tasks — though for complex tasks it gets tricky to get the bot to do exactly what you want, since “prompting” is a science.

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini (by Google), Meta AI (in WhatsApp), Grok (by X) are all chatbots — chat interfaces to large language models.

AI images. Every regen needs visuals — for the website, posters, social media, blog, events, reports. You can now instantly create images using text-to-image AI models. Simply describe what you have in mind and the AI generates images instantly. You can iterate on images just by changing the words and see the image evolve. Midjourney and DALL·E (inside ChatGPT) are two great text-to-image AI services. I’ve been using both — to design a book cover, images for my blog, presentations, and the logo for my startup.

AI grant writer. Grants are mission-critical to our cause. I’ve worked as a nonprofit fundraiser and I understand how demanding the process is. That’s why I founded GrantOrb — an AI that writes a complete winning proposal from just a short description in 5 minutes. The AI also assesses how your proposal fares against the funder’s giving criteria and automatically creates a list of line-item expenses for your project. You can also use any chatbot to consult on the grant opportunity, but chatbots can’t write a full grant. You’d have to work section by section and require prompt expertise to write the full proposal.

GrantOrb — AI grant writer.

AI videos. AI video is something I’m really excited about because it gives everyone the power to create Hollywood-style videos from just words. You don’t need a big setup and budget. Regens will be able to create powerful videos to tell the story of their cause and impact.

The AI video technology is still new — the two dominant players right now are Luma and RunwayML. OpenAI’s Sora and Kling are still to release. Highly recommend playing around with text-to-video and image-to-video tech.

AI songs. Yep — you’ve never thought of communicating your cause via a song, but now you can. AI has made song creation a breeze. You don’t need to be a singer or know how to play instruments. Just describe what the song is going to be about and the AI creates a song complete with beats. You can iterate, remix, evolve — just by changing the words. Suno and Udio are two AI music generation platforms, and I’ve been using both to musically tell the story of GrantOrb.

AI for content. All of the above tools are great for creating content — written, visual, and audio. There are a couple of other apps I’d like to list which aren’t AI-first but have integrated AI into their existing technology. Canva, Google Photos, CapCut, Descript — they have tons of AI features like background removal, text-to-image, text-to-speech. I’ve used HeyGen, an AI-first video creator, to create product demos in minutes — simply animating my image and using text to create audio, which gives a lot of precision and control on speech.

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Well — this is just the start. We’re only 19 months into the GenAI revolution. There’s so much more to come. The AI models are getting better and faster, and Apple is still to bring their AI on-device.

If you’d like to chat about how you can apply this powerful technology to 100x your impact, connect here, on X, or LinkedIn.

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P.S. — Crypto Good is now Accelerating Good, to better cover all tech that’s accelerating positive change.

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Originally published on Substack — read the original →.