My 8 Favorite Real-World Uses for Creative AI Tools

AI allows anything from your wildest imagination to become reality. You can use AI tools for professional reasons or just for fun, but many AI features are gimmicks and not worth investing your time in. Here are my favorite real-world uses for creative AI tools that anyone can use.

1 Product Photography and Mockups

If you’re selling graphic t-shirts or other clothing apparel, then using AI to make clothing mockups can save you time and money, especially if you’re dropshipping or don’t have the means to pre-purchase the stock to photograph it. While AI cannot produce branded results, generic items often suffice for helpful mockups.

There are also tools that provide product photography backgrounds if you’re photographing products but don’t have suitable backgrounds. While styling product photography is easy in the right setting, you might not be able to access the setting you require. AI tools like Flair or Kittl let you curate a background to suit your product photo.

2 Seamless Object Removal

Using a clone tool in Photoshop or another software is a simple enough way to remove unwanted objects from your images, but it does take time and precision. Depending on the complexity of what you need to remove, sometimes it’s frustrating and impossible to get right.

Generative AI brought object removal to the next level, and it’s implemented in most software. Photoshop has Generative Fill, Canva has Magic Edit, and Luminar Neo has GenSwap—but there are countless other software with similar AI tools.

Using generative AI to remove and replace distractions is faster and usually more successful than doing it yourself using a selection tool or clone tools. Generative AI lets you remove distractions—like tourists in your vacation photos or your brother making a peace sign in a serious family photo—so you can proudly share and display your photos.

3 Coloring Book Illustrations

If you’re trying to entertain your child, or you’re a child at heart, coloring is a great way to pass the time and relax your brain. Maybe buying a coloring book might feel overwhelming with so many empty pages, or perhaps you just haven’t found a book that tickles your interests.

Using generative AI and text-to-image tools, you can create your own linework illustrations to print and color in at home.

While there are many pieces of software that you could use, I used Canva and its Magic Media tool. The style I chose was Doodle (found in Graphics), which provides an outline drawing of my generated prompt. I made some coloring pages for my seven-year-old niece, and the best part of doing this was being able to involve her in the process.

I told my niece she could color anything from her wildest imagination, so we came up with a hot dog prompt using Canva’s text-to-image tool. Then I added further text using Canva’s generic text feature, allowing us to have a completely personalized image to print at home and color in.

4 Idea Generation

AI chatbots—like ChatGPT—are built into almost all software these days. While I don’t condone using AI to write your professional or educational papers, it can be a great part of your idea generation workflow.

AI chatbots can help with brainstorming ideas, research topics, and trending data, or be a quick way to provide information before you independently fact-check. You can also use AI chatbots for idea generation for non-writing projects, such as design research, video topics, or learning new art techniques. You can use an AI chatbot similarly to how you might use Google’s search engine to yield fast results.

5 Wholesome Portraits and Illustrations

Although I often don’t like the gimmicky side of AI use, creating wholesome portraits or illustrations can be fun—even if it is a gimmick, really.

I don’t condone using AI image generators to entirely replace original art, but it can be fun to turn your dog into a cartoon, your parents into a clay 3D model, or even to see how you might look in your high school photos at your current age. Fotor is a great tool for creating fun avatars and illustrations of you and your friends or family.

6 Restoring Old Photos

Finding old family photos can be a lovely trip down memory lane, but sometimes they’re old, tattered, torn, and have seen better days. On top of that, any film photos from before the 70s are often in black and white or sepia tones which makes it hard to visualize the people in the frame as once-living family you may be related to.

With AI tools, you can restore those photos and help you turn tatty or discolored photos into modern-day family pictures, with eye colors you can match to your own and hair colors that make you realize familial connections lost over time.

7 AI Upscaling

Even with the technology our smartphones and cameras offer now, sometimes your photos just don’t come out high enough quality, especially when you resize them to be larger. Pixelation happens in raster images when they’re stretched bigger than their megapixels allow for.

Even though you can resize images easily in Photoshop, there’s still a limit to how the quality can hold up. Using AI upscaling tools offers fast and easy ways to increase your image’s quality when you need to resize your image.

You can find AI upscaling tools in many creative and AI-based software; however, most of them are locked behind paywalls or subscription packages. Pixlr is a browser-based tool that offers its AI Super Scale feature for free.

8 Short-Form Video Creation

Creating short-form videos for my social channels can feel overwhelming at times. Although I know my way around video editing software, when I’m just creating videos for fun, I don’t like to spend too long on them. I’ve found help from two places and their AI tools for short-form videos.

Adobe Express has a built-in TikTok Symphony Assistant—the same tool is found natively on TikTok—in which I can ask its AI to share trending topics or video ideas for my target keywords, and it provides example videos for me to be inspired by. The TikTok Symphony Assistant is trained on TikTok’s algorithm, and although I don’t use TikTok personally, the information is helpful for any type of short-form video.

CapCut is great for creating short-form videos, even without AI. Its built-in Smart Ads tool and Smart Templates have been my favorite tools when I don’t want to spend time and energy editing my footage to fit a beat, narrative, or storyline. It does it all for me, and still lets me edit the results if it’s not quite right.

I’m always excited to try out new AI features and tools, but usually I’m disappointed by the results or just can’t think of why I’d use the tools beyond fun experimentation. The list of tools above can and should be used by anyone who’s over the gimmicks and wants a real purpose for AI. It can be helpful, time-saving, and produce great results for things you may otherwise spend too much time or money producing yourself. AI can still be fun and wholesome, with real-world uses.