Generative AI Applications and Tools
Reading Time: 6 minutes
The list of generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI) applications, tools and methods grows daily. This is a small selection of those more commonly accessed within each category.
Before you Explore
As you test and experiment with these tools, consider using the below table to evaluate the safety and privacy of the service you’re vetting. Each chatbot will have their own data collection practices. It can be helpful to scan the website, and review terms of use and privacy policy, even if you don’t know all of the jargon. Look for the following criteria, and consider how closely or not they match the ideal. In this section the term “user” refers to you or your students.
| Ask Yourself | Ideal Answer | Potentially Risky |
| Who or what appears to be the primary market? | Post-secondary education or a particular industry. | Heavily advertised products with little contextualized functionality demonstrated. |
| What kind of information does the service collect about me? | Ideally, as little as possible, perhaps just your email and name. | Requires extensive information that makes you personally identifiable, such as your address, phone number, or credit card, or may share this with third parties. |
| What kinds of information might it collect from my students? | Ideally, as little as possible, perhaps just their email or name. Little to no information should be collected about students. | Any information that makes them personally identifiable, such as name, student number, address, or any of the above, particularly if shared with third parties. |
| What data protection standards is it in compliance with? | GDPR compliant (General Data Protection Regulation, the EU regulations on information privacy). | No noted compliance with standards such as GDPR (EU), AIDA (Canada – in development), PIPEDA (Canada), or FERPA (US). |
| Where is data stored? | In Canada. | If this is not specified. |
| Who owns any data/text that I might input to the system? | You should retain rights to the material, and the service should not retain a copy to support the training models. Data retained should be destroyed within 30-60 days. | If the service retains a copy of any materials input, or it is used to train the model, offered to third-party services, or to other users in the same or other formats. |
| Who owns any data/text that I get it to output or create? | Output rights, title and interest should ideally be owned by you, even if you decide to delete your account. | If the service retains exclusive, non-transferable, sublicensable rights to any materials or outputs, or can also grant them to other users, or if a copy is kept even if you should delete your account. |
| What costs are entailed? | There is a free trial version or level of service with which to experiment prior to investing, and pricing for paid accounts is available and transparent. | There is no free level of access, even on a limited term, or pricing is not available for consideration. |
| Am I easily able to delete my account? | You should be able to delete your account and associated data easily and quickly. There should be no exit fee to retain anything created using the service. | Any costs associated with exiting the service or retaining content. |
Many generative AI services might not meet all or many of the ideal answers above. Some might have a combination of ideal answers and red flags, for example. For any help in making this kind of assessment, reach out to the Privacy Office.
Chatbots
| Tool | Type | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | AI chatbot | Freely available; ChatGPT Plus is $30/monthly CAD | Popularly known chatbot; Turn off conversation history to ensure greater privacy, and use paid service to connect to search engines or access API. |
| Microsoft Bing | AI chatbot integrated into Bing Search engine | Freely available | Variation of ChatGPT with different chatbot persona, leverages GPT 4. Use alongside Bing Search to integrate ChatGPT-like outputs with sources, and real-time updated information. |
| Chatsonic | AI chatbot within writing application (Writesonic) | free (10k words) long-form $12.67/mo (60k + GPT-4) | Uses GPT-4 and is subscription based; Internet access brings broader knowledge; Companion browser extension and Android app |
| Jasper Chat | AI chatbot within writing application (Jasper) | Starter $40/mo (35k words) Boss $82/mo (100k words) | Medium to complex conversations; toggle to include Google search data. Retains context but performs with an older dataset. |
| Google Bard AI | AI chatbot | Not currently available in Canada | Lightweight model version of LaMDA, Google’s language and conversational model. Currently has limited ability to hold context, and only English language. Data is collected and used to improve responses. |
| YouChat | AI chatbot plug-in | Freely available. | Built into a search engine, so it can provide up-to-date information. Currently integrates images, code and other types of outputs. |
| Perplexity AI | AI chatbot | Freely available. | Cites sources with answers; may copy from sources |
Code Generators
| Tool | Type | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot | AI-powered coding assistance | individuals ($10/mo) business ($19/user/mo) | natural language to code suggest code and entire functions in real-time, right from your editor integrates with popular development environments supports wide range of languages organizational policies privacy |
| TabNine | AI-powered coding assistance | free (short code completion) pro $12/mo (longer, smarter, accurate) | natural language to code Trained on open source code with permissive licenses —————— whole-line & full-function code completions learns your coding style integrates with popular development environments supports wide range of languages cloud or local storage |
| Replit GhostWriter | AI-powered coding assistance | free (limited storage, workspace & outbound data transfer) Hacker $7/mo (more storage, faster workspace & | soon to have GitHub app natural language to code autocomplete prompt driven development production quality code soon to have test generation |
| MutableAI | AI-powered coding assistance | free (manual suggestions) basic $10/mo (+automated suggestions) Codebase Pro $25/mo/seat (+multifile code gen, AI based code search) | Medium to complex conversations; toggle to include Google search data. Retains context but performs with an older dataset. |
| Seek | AI-powered code generator | free trial, no other pricing available | code editor, knowledge base, data warehouse integrations, and more SQL queries without manually generating code |
| AI2SQL | AI-powered code generator | 7 day free trial Start $7/mo (basic SQL-related languages) Pro $17/mo (more languages) | write complex SQL queries natural language to SQL code |
Graphics and Art Generators
| Tool | Type | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nightcafe | Pure Art Generator | free (28 credits/day) pro (from $10 -80 US/month) | text-to-image generator upload image for style change choice of model: Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2, Coherent, Artistic, and Style Transfer |
| Starry AI | Pure Art Generator | free (5/day without watermarks) pro (??) | full ownership of creations natural or more abstract renders text-to-image generator choice of medium (to match artist or art period) |
| Fotor | Pure Art Generator | Free (basic functionality) Pro $40 US/mo (advanced functionality) | photo editor + AI art generator + graphics + graphics template library HD capability, stock photos, file management, resizing |
| Deep Dream Generator | Pure Art Generator | free advanced $20/mo (more space, images & resolution) professional $39/mo (even more) | expand an image with an art style text-to-image AI art |
| Jasper Art | Art Generator with AI Writing Tools | 5 day free trial (maybe $20/mo but can’t confirm) | integrate AI-generated art into copy text-to-image AI art Uses DALL-E 2 model High-resolution 2K pixel images Royalty-free commercial use No watermark |
| Rytr | Art Generator with AI Writing Tools | Free to try with 10 image generation credits that you can use to create up to 20 images; premium pricing, not listed | text-to-image AI art upload an image for the AI to create variations add or remove shadows and object to create a more realistic image |
| DALL-E 2 | AI Image Generation Model | free $0.016 to $0.02 / image depending on resolution | Cites sources with answers; may copy from sources |
| Midjourney | AI Image Generation Models | beta testing … runs through Discord server | Natural Language text-to-image AI art |
| Stable Diffusion | AI Image Generation Models | free | text to image AI art image to image AI art no personal information required |
| Adobe Firefly | Pure Art Generator | in beta image and video creation |
Miscellaneous
| Tool | Type | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roblox Code Assist | AI Assistant | AI assistant in Studio Script Editor | |
| TL:DR | Summarizer | get summary of any YouTube Video |
Research
| Tool | Type | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| elicit | Research Assistant | research assistant using language models uses semantic similarity, which finds papers related to your question even if they don’t use the same keywords search forwards and backwards in the citation graph | |
| consensus | Research Assistant | uses AI to instantly extract and aggregate scientific findings related to a user’s query. | |
| ResearchRabbit | Research Assistant | “Spotify” for papers personalized collections interactive visualizations | |
| ConnectedPapers | Research Assistant | visual tool find and explore papers relative to discipline based on Co-citation and Bibliographic Coupling | |
| Penelope | Paper Checker | cost per paper | ensure manuscripts meet journal requirements 30+ checks … currently specific journals |
| Inciteful | Research Assistant | search engine for academic papers build literature map (links to Litmaps) | |
| Litmaps | Research Assistant | seed, discover, map academic papers | |
| Scite | Research Assistant | – browser extension – compares how many other published research papers support or refute a paper – identifies how many citations a paper has received – use natural language to search for research papers – drafting of papers |
User Experience
| Tool | Type | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uizard | UI generator | free pro business | turn hand-drawn sketch into UX design |
| useGalileo | UI generator | idea to design (from text) still in early access | |
| syntheticUsers | User research AI tool | Test your idea or product with AI participants and take decisions with confidence still in beta | |
| Amped Research | User research AI tool | range of research tools, including surveys, user testing, and analytics not publicly available | |
| Looppanel | User research AI tool | free (15 transcripts) pro $25/mo (25 transcripts) premium $54/mo (50 transcripts) | assistant for user research records your calls, transcribes them, and centralizes all your research data in one place |
| Sprig | AI research analysis | free (1 link survey, 1 concept test, <= 5k users) starter for pros $199/mo (monthly limits | collect targeted user insights identify common themes in feedback |
Writing Generators and Paraphrasing Tools
| Tool | Type | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jasper | General Writing | Starter $40/mo (35k words) Boss $82/mo (100k words) | long-form document editor plagiarism detector 50+ templates browser extension support for 30+ languages art add-on |
| Writesonic | Summarizer | free (10k words) long-form $12.67/mo (60k + GPT-4) | Leverages GPT4 with subscription |
| Sudowrite | General Writing | Hobby & Student $10/mo (30k words) Professional $20/mo (90k words) | generate content rewrite existing content into something new elaborate on something when you need more words brainstorm ideas multiple languages won’t plagiarize unless forces (against terms of service) |
| Rytr | General Writing | Free $0 (10k words) Saver $9/mo (100k words) Unlimited $29/mo (no limit) | 40+ use cases 30+ languages 20+ tones plagiarism checker image generation |
| Chibi AI | General Writing | Lite $20/mo (unlimited documents) Monthly $42/mo (unlimited) | creativity modes / dynamic style adapting built-in Grammarly expert mode specialized writing tools custom templates |
| Paragraph AI | Apps & Browser Extensions (Chrome plug-in) | Student $120/yr (1M+ words + 150 writes/day Professional $150/yr ( | Tone selection to write content 30+ languages Grammar checker Plagiarism checker Instant replies |
| Copy AI | General writing | Free $0 (2k words/mo) Pro $36/mo (unlimited words, 5 seats) | 90+ copywriting tools unlimited projects 25+ languages wizards |
| Quillbot | Apps & Browser Extensions (Chrome + Word plug-in) | Free (125 words in paraphraser) Premium $20 US/mo (unlimited words, 20 pages/mo scanning) | paraphrasing ——— grammar checker plagiarism checker co-writer summarizer citation generator translator |
| Wordtune | Apps & Browser Extensions (Chrome, Edge, Word plug-in) | Free Premium (unlimited rewrites) | rewrite/paraphrase spell/grammar checks tones ———— shorten/expand paragraph rewrites |
| Grammarly | Apps & Browser Extensions (Chrome plug-in) | Licensed by college | audience-specific tone & style guide while writing proof-reading … grammar, spelling, punctuation, style suggestions long-form content editor |
