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Generative AI tools now span various types that can produce text, images, audio, videos and code. These are some of the most popular generators revolutionizing content creation.
Generative AI tools — which rely on a form of artificial intelligence that makes original text, images, videos, audio and code — has transformed daily life, enhancing both creativity and productivity.
Looking ahead, generative AI tools are expected to become as essential as smartphones, the cloud and the internet itself, promising both exciting opportunities and some serious risks.
Generative AI tools are software programs designed to create new content using advanced AI models. Typically built on neural networks, these models can identify structures and patterns within massive amounts of annotated data. Then, given a prompt or input, the AI is able to draw upon what it has learned to generate relevant, original works — often in real time.
Below are some of the most popular generative AI tools available today. Some specialize in a single type of content, and others can handle multiple mediums at once. Either way, these tools are shaking up a variety of industries, from the creative arts to software development.
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ChatGPT is designed to understand and generate human-like text based on the input it receives, meaning it is capable of answering questions, providing explanations, writing poems and completing lots of other text-based tasks. It can also understand and produce images, video and audio. ChatGPT’s versatility and conversational abilities make the chatbot a valuable tool across all sorts of industries, from customer service to creative writing.
Claude generates natural written responses to both text and image-based user inputs. With broad context and reasoning capabilities, Claude can edit large documents, carry on lengthy conversations and create a variety of original content. It is also trained using a method called “constitutional AI,” where ethical principles guide its behavior. This approach aims to reduce biases and inaccuracies in Claude’s responses, setting it apart from other chatbots, according to its maker, Anthropic.
Character.ai is a platform that lets users design personalized AI assistants. Users can tailor traits like an assistant’s personality and avatar to fit their preferences, and the platform also has assistants for specific contexts readily available. For more common applications, users can search for assistants based on categories like writing, learning and gaming.
Midjourney generates images based on natural language prompts. The tool is accessible either through its website or a Discord bot, which can be prompted to create an image using the “/imagine” command. Since its launch in 2022, Midjourney has become a popular (yet controversial) tool for publications, authors, journalists and other creatives. It even became the first platform of its kind to produce an image that won an actual art competition, sparking both wonder and widespread debate.
DALL-E 3 is a text-to-image generator developed by OpenAI. The tool is built natively on ChatGPT, enabling users to more easily produce and tweak their creations using natural language prompts. Once an image has been generated, users can quickly edit them by either conversing with ChatGPT or interacting with the image directly. To avoid producing deceptive, derivative or otherwise harmful content, DALL-E 3 will not generate images of public figures by name and will not copy the style of another living artist’s work, according to OpenAI.
Lindy lets users build agentic “AI employees.” Through natural-language processing and a no-code interface, these agents can be programmed to handle administrative tasks and operational workflows. Some of its use cases include initiating sales outreach over email, handling customer support queries and screening inbound calls.
Gamma is an AI tool that uses generative models to turn text prompts into presentations, documents and simple websites. After generating a draft, users can edit decks and pages through natural language instructions or the built-in editing tools. Since launching in 2022, the company has attracted interest from major investment firms and reached a $2.1 billion valuation in 2025.
Adobe Firefly is a multimodal AI tool that can input and generate text, images, audio and videos. As a result, Firefly users can pair soundtracks with visuals, produce videos from images and generate images from text prompts, among other capabilities. The tool is part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite and is intended to work in tandem with other Adobe applications like Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro.
Gemini is a generative AI tool developed by Google. Powered by a family of multimodal models in various sizes, Gemini can handle a wide range of tasks. It can engage in text-based conversations, transcribe audio, create artwork, analyze videos and much more. Gemini models are being incorporated into several other Google products, including Gmail, Docs and its search engine.
Imagen 3 is Google DeepMind’s latest image generator that can process naturally written prompts, so users don’t need to be skilled in prompt engineering. In addition, Imagen 3 is built to understand and capture finer details like textures, camera angles and lighting, enabling users to produce images in a broader range of styles. Out of caution, the DeepMind team used red teaming and thorough data labeling techniques to ensure Imagen 3 meets the company’s fairness, bias and safety standards.
Suno is a music-creation program that can generate realistic instrumentals and vocals from a single text prompt. Users can play around with their prompts to craft a song about a particular topic or genre — an emotional synthpop song about rainy mornings, for example, or a rockabilly song about being in love. While Suno has admitted to training its AI model on copyrighted songs, it argues this follows the fair-use doctrine.
Developed by former Google DeepMind researchers, Udio produces both vocals and instrumentals. Its musical creations are based on user text inputs, which can include genre, story direction and similar artists from which to draw inspiration. Once it has been prompted, Udio generates two 30-second songs to choose from, which can be extended and edited with more prompting. Like Suno, Udio has been a target for copyright infringement claims, but it also cites the fair-use doctrine.
Soundraw generates royalty-free instrumentals and beats. The platform caters to a wide range of creators, from vocalists seeking backing tracks to marketers in need of mood-setting music for their social media posts. All users have to do is choose their preferred genre, mood, tempo and song length (up to five minutes). Once the song has been generated, users can customize the music before freely distributing and monetizing their creations on platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram without any copyright concerns.
Synthesia creates AI-generated videos, complete with voiceovers and realistic-looking avatars that represent various demographics and moods. Users upload their script, choose their avatar and customize their video’s layout. From there, the platform uses natural language processing and deep learning techniques to generate footage that shows the avatar reading the script, along with additional voiceovers and supplemental text. Users can choose from more than 230 stock avatars or create their own.
Runway creates AI-generated images, animations and 3D models using relative motion analysis to generate realistic motion graphics. Its underlying model — trained on both images and videos — powers both its text-to-video and image-to-video capabilities, offering precise control over style, structure and camera movement. Used in movies like Everything Everywhere All At Once, as well as music videos for artists like A$AP Rocky and Kanye West, Runway is designed for professionals in filmmaking, post-production, advertising, editing and visual effects.
Dream Machine makes high-quality, realistic videos from both text and image inputs. Created by Luma AI, the tool was built on a scalable, multimodal transformer architecture. It can generate clips up to five seconds long, complete with realistic physics, smooth cinematography and even drama. In addition, Dream Machine lets users repurpose and edit content, allowing them to experiment with different versions.
ChatPDF is described as being “like ChatGPT but for PDFs.” Users can upload a PDF of any document they want ChatPDF to analyze, and they can then ask the tool questions about the document. Students can use the AI app to locate key points quickly, develop study questions and prepare for exams. ChatPDF is also helpful for reviewing academic pieces, legal contracts and other dense documents.
Elicit is a platform that allows users to navigate a database of more than 125 million research papers by submitting requests and questions in natural conversation. Not only can users receive single-sentence summaries of a piece, but they can also rely on Elicit to locate other relevant research papers and organize their findings into tables. Users can even upload their own PDFs and ask Elicit questions for further analysis.
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GitHub Copilot is a code-completion tool created by GitHub and OpenAI. Designed for both individual developers and businesses, it generates new code from natural language prompts. For example, if a user writes “design a landing page for a website,” the tool will produce the appropriate code. It is also equipped with a chatbot powered by the GPT-4 language model, allowing users to converse with Copilot in real time and ask questions about their code.
Cohere Generate is an AI text generator that can produce copy for product descriptions, landing pages, marketing emails, blog posts and other materials. Users simply need to submit a prompt or example to guide Generate’s response. Generate is powered by Cohere’s family of Command language models, which are designed to deliver high accuracy while adapting to fit an organization’s particular brand voice.
Copy.ai is a text generator designed for sales and marketing teams. Built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-4 LLM, it can produce all kinds of content, including articles, blogs, social media posts and product descriptions — all of which can be written in a customized brand voice, ensuring each piece is consistent with a company’s identity and personality. The platform also provides an infobase, where users can teach Copy.ai the ins and outs of their products and services so that it gets the details correct in its outputs.
While it positions itself as an all-in-one marketing app, Jasper is a popular text generator, offering a suite of tools to help users write, optimize and rank their content. The tool can generate content in a variety of brand voices and lengths, whether it’s a social media post, long-form article or press release. Jasper also comes with a chat feature, a language translation tool (trained on more than 80 languages) and an art generator, which produces royalty-free images that can be used in ads, blogs and social media posts.
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Consensus is an AI search engine that focuses on academic research. Students and researchers alike can access a database of more than 200 million academic papers, refining their searches with prompt instructions, filters and quality indicators that signal the authority of each source. Researchers and clinicians can narrow their searches even further based on factors like methodology, study design and sample size.
Amazon Q is a generative AI assistant that connects to an organization’s data, so it can help locate data, answer questions and simplify workflows. Paired with other tools like Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Q can help with writing code, guiding customer conversations and monitoring supply chains, among other applications. Amazon Q also understands data permissions, giving access to authorized users only.
Microsoft Copilot is an AI assistant that can operate in Edge and Windows and as part of the Microsoft 365 suite. As a web browser tool, Copilot accesses Bing’s database to address user queries and improve the search experience. As a tool in Microsoft 365, Copilot can connect with an organization’s data, allowing it to retrieve relevant company data, automate business processes and generate summaries of meetings, among other capabilities.
Generative AI by Getty Images was trained on the website’s stock images, enabling users to create fully licensed images with comprehensive usage rights. Users enter a text prompt to generate four unique images, which can be customized by adjusting color, mood, lens type, and more. These images can be downloaded and licensed, with each including legal indemnification of up to $50,000. Getty ensures that its AI-generated images do not feature recognizable characters, logos or other intellectual property. And users’ creations are not available for others to license without permission.
Colossyan helps companies create training, marketing and corporate communication videos by generating human-like AI avatars that deliver material with realistic lip-syncing. The platform offers hundreds of diverse avatars, voices and customizable backdrops, and even enables scenarios where multiple avatars can interact with each other. It can automatically translate into more than 70 languages, and includes features like conversation modes and multiple-choice quizzes for assessing viewer engagement.
Tabnine offers code completion services in more than two dozen languages and integrated development environments (IDEs). Not only can it generate code, but it can also convert natural language into code (and vice versa), test code and fix bugs. The tool can also learn from users’ individual coding patterns and styles, enabling more accurate and personalized suggestions over time. Available both online via the cloud and offline with a local AI mode, Tabnine was trained exclusively on open-source data, ensuring that the code it generates is not copyrighted and can be freely used by other developers.
Generative AI tools are software programs that can create original content (text, images, videos, audio and code) using advanced AI models.
Five of the top generative AI tools include text generators ChatGPT and Claude, image generators DALL-E 3 and Midjourney and music generator Suno.
Some popular examples of generative AI tools include text generator ChatGPT, image generator DALL-E 3, code generator GitHub Copilot, music generator Suno, voice generator ElevenLabs and video generator Synthesia.
Yes, many generative AI tools come with free plans that offer basic features. These include ChatGPT, Claude, Character.ai, Imagen 3 and GitHub Copilot.
Matthew Urwin contributed reporting to this story.
