The 9+ Best AI Tools for Creative People in 2024
Every artist and content creator knows the struggle of facing a blank page. Your mouse cursor seems to blink at you mockingly as you struggle to find the words to write, or edit your newest video or film.
Meanwhile, you have a deadline to meet and a content schedule to fill. I’ve been there, and it sucks!
But guess what? Whether we are ready for them or not, AI tools are changing everything about making content.
As a creative filmmaker, screenwriter, and content creator myself, I’ve been doing tons of research into the best AI tools that can help the workflow for creative people such as writers, authors, filmmakers, and digital creators.
I’ve tried out each of these tools and can vouch for their usefulness. There are tons of AI companies out there (with more being released daily, it seems!), and these are the ones I’ve found most helpful to me.
In this article, I’m going to show you how these new AI tools can help you increase your productivity and creativity. We’ll talk about HeyGen for making videos, ElevenLabs for amazing AI voices, and Pictory for editing videos with AI.
Are you ready to change how you create? Let’s jump in and see how these AI tools can make your projects even better!
|
Best AI Storytelling Software
|
Best For AI Digital Art Videos
|
Best AI Image Generator
|
|
Has a free trial, and paid plans start at $19/month (or just $10 if you pay yearly)
|
$19 to $99/month (also has a free trial, but your video will have a watermark)
|
$10 to $120/month (the $10 plan will be enough for most people!)
|
This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission if you purchase through my links, at no extra cost to you. Please read full disclosure for more information.
What Are the Best AI Tools for Creative People?
Let’s take a look at the best AI tools for creative people! These are tools that can enhance your creative process, not take over for it.
1. Sudowrite
Sudowrite is a powerful tool for creating long-form fictional content that impresses your target audience. This AI content generator and virtual content assistant is geared toward writers and can help with writer’s block.
The automatically generated content is 100% original, which makes it useful for generating content ideas when you’re stuck.
Top Features
- Vivid Descriptions: Enhances stories with rich details, which makes your scenes more lifelike and engaging.
- Quick Novel Writing: Offers a step-by-step process for developing ideas, outlines, and chapters.
- Easy Writing: The “write” feature generates the next 300 words of your story in your own personal writing style.
- Fixes Fast Pacing: Helps with your story’s pacing by elaborating on rushed sections of your story.
- Gives Helpful Feedback: The “betareader” feature analyzes your novel or story and provides targeted advice for improvement.
- Story Planning Aid: Gives creative suggestions for plot points, character arcs, and themes.
- Creative Brainstorming Tool: Generates endless ideas for names, items, and titles.
- Visualization Feature: Transforms your written descriptions into visual art, which helps with the mental process of character and world-building.
- Sudowrite is my top overall choice for the best AI novel writing software program!
Pricing
Sudowrite has three plans:
- Hobby and Student plan: It costs $19 a month (or only $10/month if you pay yearly!)
- Professional plan: It costs $29 a month (a better deal!)
- Max plan: It costs $159 a month
All plans are now based on a credit system. The number of credits you use as you write will depend on the AI model that you choose to use within Sudowrite.
Sudowrite Pros
Sudowrite Cons
Sudowrite’s new updates include Project Duplication for easily copying entire projects, Document Folders for organizing documents, a Tab function for quick tool access, and the integration of Anthropic’s advanced AI models like Claude 3 for enhanced writing assistance.
My Experience With Sudowrite
Sudowrite is quite easy to use, even for beginners. Here’s a peek at the user interface and how it looks (this image is from a screenplay I was trying out):
There are so many different features in the Sudowrite program – there is a whole section just for brainstorming, one for rewriting, one for plot twists, and tons more!
Here’s where you will go to get started working on a new story – the Story Bible.
In this section, you are able to add your characters and some information about them, your genre, style, synopsis, and story outline. Then, the AI will help you to start your story (this is often the hardest part of starting a work of fiction!).
I think Sudowrite is a really great choice for creative writing with AI. To read the story that Sudowrite wrote for me, you can check out my full Sudowrite review!
Bottom Line
Sudowrite is best for creative writers. I’ve tried it out quite a bit, and have seen its usefulness for many aspects of creative writing (including getting ideas, descriptive sentences, plot twist ideas, help with outlining, and for giving ideas for improving the story overall).
I’m still wary of using it for writing the actual story, although I know plenty of writers who do use Sudowrite to help them with a lot of their story.
2. Jasper
Jasper is one of the most well-known AI writing tools, and it is my top choice overall. This software can produce high-quality content for your social media posts, on your blog, and so on.
In addition, this AI writing tool has a Jasper Command feature that lets you instruct the AI as though you were talking to a friend. It’s an impressive tool that uses machine learning to incredible effect.
Top Features
- Variety of Templates: Provides numerous templates for different content needs, which speeds up the writing process significantly.
- Summarizing/Paraphrasing: Efficiently converts long-form content into concise versions, perfect for social media posts.
- Content Expander: Helps in elaborating and enriching brief or incomplete sections. It’s great for writers facing creative blocks.
- Social Media Templates: Offers specialized templates for creating great social media content.
- AI Art Generator: Generates unique art pieces based on your input (text and existing images). You can read all about it in my Jasper art review!
- Brand Voice: Analyzes your existing content to create a consistent brand voice.
Pricing
Jasper AI has three plans:
- Creator plan: Starts at $49 a month (less if you pay yearly!)
- Pro plan: Starts at $69 a month
- Business plan: Has a custom price. Contact Jasper’s sales team for more information
Jasper Pros
Jasper Cons
Jasper AI has updated its features for a smoother experience. Now, you can choose voice and language right from the Create menu. The new Editor and Dashboard make all content tasks easier, and with the improved Knowledge Base, downloading and remixing content is more efficient than ever.
My Experience With Jasper AI
Jasper AI is really easy to use, much easier than Chat-GPT. I love that I don’t need to know any prompts in order to use it. Here’s a screenshot of the templates that I use most often:
Here’s how their “creative story” template looks and works:
Bottom Line
Jasper is a great all-around AI writing and marketing solution for creators who don’t want to spend too much time learning copywriting or AI prompting. Jasper has templates for pretty much any use you might have, so you don’t need to use any prompts (unless you want to in their “Jasper Chat” feature).
I personally use Jasper for helping me write social media content and captions, blog post ideas and outlines, and summary documents like script synopses and treatments.
3. ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs is by far the best and most realistic-sounding AI voiceover software available right now. I’ve tried a bunch of different ones, and this one was the winner, hands down!
Top Features
- Wide Range of Voices: Offers a diverse selection of voices in various accents and languages.
- Custom Voice Creation: Unique feature that allows users to create custom voices. You can even clone your own voice!
- Emotion and Tone Control: Enables users to adjust the emotion and tone of the voice, such as making it sound happy, sad, or excited.
- Easy Integration: Can be integrated with other software and platforms. This makes is super versatile for content creators, filmmakers, and authors who want to try using AI to narrate their book.
Pricing
ElevenLabs has three subscription plans:
- Free plan: Really just meant for you to try it out.
- Starter plan: Only $5 per month, which makes it super affordable! Get 30,000 characters of AI voice generated per month.
- Creator Plan: Just $22 per month for 100,000 characters of AI voice, plus get professional-level voice cloning of your own voice.
ElevenLabs Pros
ElevenLabs Cons
Bottom Line
ElevenLabs is a great choice for anyone who needs to create AI voices. It’s very affordable, easy to use, and its voices are the most realistic and customizable of any of the AI voice generation companies right now!
4. Topaz Video AI
Topaz Video AI is a fantastic tool for serious filmmakers and video content creators. It takes your low-quality video footage and upscales it so that it looks like 4k, 8k or even 16k!
Top Features
- Improved Video Quality: It not only increases resolution but also enhances overall video quality by refining textures, sharpening edges, and reducing noise and artifacts.
- Frame Rate Conversion: Topaz Video AI can increase the frame rate of videos, providing smoother motion. This is especially useful for action sequences or dynamic scenes.
- AI-Powered Restoration: The program can effectively restore and enhance old and damaged footage. It’s fantastic for archival projects or re-releasing classic films.
- Compatibility with Various Formats: Topaz Video AI supports a wide range of video formats.
- Batch Processing Capability: Allows for the processing of multiple videos simultaneously, which is a huge time-saver for larger projects.
- Creative Flexibility: Enables content creators to repurpose and enhance older content for new projects.
Pricing
Topaz Video Enhance AI is available for a single purchase price of $299.99.
This price includes a full year of complimentary software updates, which are typically released every one to two months. After the initial year, you have the option to continue updating your software for an additional cost, or you can continue to use the last updated version indefinitely.
Topaz Labs offers a 30-day unconditional refund policy. If you’re not completely satisfied with the product, simply reach out to them for a hassle-free refund.
Additionally, Topaz Labs provides a free trial of their video upscaling software. This allows you to test the software and see the quality of the results for yourself. To export your trial videos without a watermark, you will need to purchase the full version of the software.
Topaz Video AI Pros
Topaz Video AI Cons
Topaz Video Enhance AI has released significant updates, including 2x and 4x upscaling options in their new DaVinci Resolve OpenFX plugin. They’ve introduced a new interlace model, updated OpenVINO for better Intel device performance, and made the user interface more intuitive.
Bottom Line
Topaz Video AI is great for any filmmakers or content creators who want to make their footage as amazing as possible! It’s the best AI upscaling software that I’ve found.
Please note that it is a downloadable software program, and it does take up quite a bit of computer resources and space. Try AVCLabs if you are looking for a cloud-based upscaling program.
5. Pictory
Pictory is a great software for editing videos with AI. Creative people can use it for a few different purposes – like editing YouTube and social media videos (Pictory includes TONS of stock videos and screen text/images that you can add to your videos to make them look better!) and using their AI to create videos automatically!
Top Features
- Text-to-Video Conversion: Converts scripts or text content directly into engaging video pieces. This is ideal for transforming blog posts, articles, or written narratives into visual stories.
- Automated Video Summarization: Changes written content like scripts, blog posts, or stories into great stock-video-based videos. It’s perfect for turning words into visual stories.
- Voice-Over Integration: Lets you easily add voice-overs to videos. You can use AI-made voices or record your own.
- Brand Customization: You can add your own branding, like logos, colors, and fonts, to make sure your videos match your brand’s look.
- Social Media Optimization: Uses AI to adjust videos to fit different social media like Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.
- Royalty-Free Media Library: Gives you lots of free pictures, stock footage and music to use in your videos. This means you don’t have to buy these things or find them somewhere else.
Pricing
Starter: Costs $23 each month (or $19 a month if you pay for the whole year). You can make up to 30 videos every month.
Professional: Costs $47 each month (or $39 a month if you pay for the whole year). You get to make up to 60 videos every month and use really good-sounding voices from ElevenLabs.
Teams: Costs $119 each month (or $99 a month if you pay for the whole year). You can make up to 90 videos every month and work together with others using their collaboration tools.
The Professional plan is my recommendation because you get to use the super-realistic voices from ElevenLabs.
Pictory Pros
Pictory Cons
- Layers: Enhance your videos with custom layouts like side-by-side frames and picture-on-picture. Perfect for podcast interviews and more!
- New Fonts: Explore 17 new fonts in both modern and classic styles in their storyboard editor. This will make it easier to find the right look for your videos.
- New Languages: Pictory’s API now supports Japanese for standard voiceovers, along with 29 other languages.
My Experience With Pictory
I find Pictory super easy to use. It’s not a program that I’d use to edit a film, but for social media videos, it’s fantastic! I love how easy and intuitive it is to use, and how many great features it has for content creators. It makes social media videos super easy to produce. Here’s an example video that I created using Pictory’s stock video footage and their AI voiceover, so you can see the program in action!
Bottom Line
Pictory is fantastic for creatives who use social media or YouTube to help build awareness of their work (and that should be all of us!).
I love their huge stock footage library, and the fact that you can use their AI to help you create an entire video. It’s affordable and you really get your money’s worth. However, I wouldn’t use it for more serious work like making short films or movies!
6. Midjourney
Midjourney is the best AI art generator that I’ve tried. It creates fantastic images in pretty much any style you can imagine.
It’s my top choice for book covers and illustrations, creating concept images for movie pitch packages and marketing, and for using on my own blog and social media.
Top Features
- Try New Styles: You can experiment with different styles and types of art.
- High-Quality Images: This tool enables you to create professional-looking images. It’s great for AI-curious artists, graphic designers, or anyone interested in visual arts.
- Inspiration Kickstart: If your creative juices aren’t flowing, Midjourney can help ignite your imagination and get you excited about new projects.
Pricing
Midjourney starts at $8 per month (paid yearly) and goes up from there.
Higher plans include quicker generations and additional images. Midjourney also has a free trial offer.
Midjourney Pros
Midjourney Cons
My Experience with Midjourney
Midjourney is a fantastic AI image generator. Here are a few of my most recent images (late December 2023):
Bottom Line
In my experience, Midjourney has been the best AI art generator that I’ve tried. Its images are very high-quality, and you can create almost anything.
The only thing I don’t love is that it can be tricky to use if you aren’t familiar with Discord.
7. ProWritingAid
ProWritingAid is my favorite AI writing assistant. It’s not fantastic at creating the writing for you (yet), but it is great at detecting spelling and grammar mistakes, and for changing your writing’s tone and style.
It’s really designed for creative writers, and can help you edit and polish your work. And, it does most of this in its free version!
Top Features
- Easy Grammar Checks: Helps you fix grammar mistakes.
- Makes Writing Clearer: Suggests ways to make your sentences better and easier to understand.
- Style Tips: Gives advice on how to make your writing style better.
- Vocabulary Enhancement: Suggests synonyms for overused words.
- Checks for Repeated Words: Alerts you to repetitive words and phrases.
- Improves Sentence Structure: Helps in varying sentence structure for a more dynamic writing style.
Pricing
ProWriting Aid Free:
- Ability to edit 500 words at a time
- Use online only
ProWritingAid Premium:
- No word limit
- Available on desktop computers
- Integrate with MS Word Processor, Google Docs, Chrome, and Scrivener
ProWritingAid Premium Pro:
- Get access to their AI writing tool for “sparks” – change tense or person of your story, create dialogue, and create analogies for your story.
ProWritingAid Pros
ProWritingAid Cons
The Premium version of ProWritingAid now includes a Tone Detector – perfect for checking how others will feel about your written work! It also now checks for overused words – with the Premium version, you can even give it specific words you’d like it to check for in your writing.
The Premium version now has a feature called “Critique Report” that will analyze your story and tell you what it thinks are its strengths and weaknesses. It looks at your story’s plot, characters, setting, and more.
Bottom Line
ProWritingAid is worth a try for pretty much any creative writer. I recommend trying their free version online, and see if you like the suggestions it gives you.
I have talked with lots of other writers, both fiction and non-fiction, and so many of them say that they use ProWritingAid for checking and adjusting grammar, tone and style in their writing! It’s a really helpful program for helping you make your writing even better than it already is.
8. HeyGen
OK, this one is for all the creative-types who want to share their writing, knowledge, or experiences with the world, but who don’t want to be on-camera!
We creatives can be a reclusive bunch, and many of us would rather stay behind the camera, and not in front of it!
Top Features
- Efficient AI-Driven Video Production: Quickly generates production-ready videos from text.
- Extensive Avatar Selection: Offers a wide range of AI avatars covering various ethnicities and styles.
- Diverse Voice Options: Features over 300 voices in more than 40 languages.
- Pre-Designed Templates: Provides lots of templates for different video types.
- One-Click Video Translation: Simplifies translating videos while maintaining natural voice and style.
Pricing
HeyGen offers ten different plans, split between five for Creators and five for Businesses, with prices ranging from $29/month to $899/month. Choosing an annual subscription reduces the cost to between $24/month and $720/month.
The plans vary in the number of monthly credits, which determine the total video length you can create. The lowest plan will be enough for many creatives!
Additionally, there’s a free trial available, allowing you to create a 1-minute demo video to explore HeyGen’s features, including testing a digital twin avatar that looks and sounds just like you.
HeyGen Pros
HeyGen Cons
HeyGen has released version 3.0 with new features like Avatar Templates, Talking Photo Generation, and text-to-image conversion. It also introduced AI Matting for background removal, Screen Recording, URL-to-video conversion, and enhanced Multi-Face Face Swapping. Previous updates added custom avatars, script writing with ChatGPT, and unified avatar and voice across scenes.
My Experience with HeyGen
HeyGen is by far the best AI digital avatar generator for content creators and creatives! Here’s a look at their dashboard and for video editing. It looks a lot more like a real video editing program than most of the other AI avatar software programs do., and I like that!
Here’s the video that I created using HeyGen! This video uses one of their existing avatars, and an AI-generated voice.
Bottom Line
HeyGen is for any creator who wants to post video content but doesn’t want to be on-camera. You can either pick an existing AI avatar, or you can literally make a digital copy of yourself.
It will move like you, look like you and sound like you. You can then use this avatar to “speak” the words you’d like to have in your video! Your audience will be none the wiser (unless you tell them!).
9. Neural Frames
Neural Frames is a brand new, unique AI animation tool for artists and creatives. The videos it creates are very pretty, and it would work very well for music video imagery.
Top Features
- Unleash Creativity: Neural Frames turns your words into digital art videos, from abstract to realistic scenes.
- Music Integration: Upload a song, and it separates it into components to sync with your video, like an AI video editor for music.
- User-Friendly: Easily place objects or create animated characters without filming anything.
Pricing
Neural Frames has four subscription plans:
- Free Trial: Create videos up to 6 seconds long (includes a watermark).
- Neural Navigator ($19/month): Offers 12 minutes of video creation with 720p upscaling for enhanced quality.
- Neural Knight ($39/month): Provides 36 minutes of video generation with 1080p upscaling.
- Neural Ninja ($99/month): Allows unlimited video creation with impressive 4K upscaling.
Neural Frames Pros
Neural Frames Cons
My Experience With Neural Frames
Neural Frames is really fun to use! Their AI animations are really interesting looking, and I think they would be great for music videos and YouTube videos. Here’s a video I made with their software:
Bottom Line
Neural Frames is a fun AI animation program for digital artists. Their program is pretty easy to use, and the images and movement it creates are fantastic. It’s best for people who are looking for “artistic” AI videos. All you need is an idea for the video and a text prompt, and the AI will do the rest!
12. invideo
Looking for an AI-powered video generator that can help you create eye-catching video content in a snap? Meet invideo – the ultimate AI video editing and creation tool for busy professionals and content creators alike.
With invideo, you can effortlessly create new videos or repurpose your existing footage for maximum impact. Choose from a vast library of templates, music, and effects to personalize your videos and make them stand out from the crowd.
Top Features
- AI-Assisted Video Creation: Automatically generates scripts, creates scenes, and adds voiceovers.
- Customization Options: Allows customization for target audience and platform.
- Stock Media Library: Access to over 16 million stock media options.
- Human-Sounding Voiceovers: Enhances videos with lifelike voiceovers.
- Collaborative Editing: Enables real-time collaboration on projects.
- Social Media and Branding Tools: Assists in creating content for brand exposure and social media success.
Pricing
There are three levels of pricing for invideo:
Free Plan: Create a video with access to templates and a media library (however, your video will contain a watermark)
Business: $30 per month – 60 videos per month & no watermark on videos
Unlimited: $60 per month – for unlimited video exports!
All plans are discounted if you pay on a yearly basis!
InVideo Pros
InVideo Cons
With its new updates, invideo has made creating and editing videos more accessible. It has introduced AI-powered tools to help generate scripts from text prompts and convert articles or blogs into videos quickly. The platform now features over 5,000 professional templates that you can easily customize alongside tons of useful AI tools!
My Experience With invideo
Invideo is also really easy to use. I think their best feature is the text-to-video generator, where invideo’s AI will generate an entire video for you from text – including stock video footage, music, and even text and transitions on the screen! Here’s the video I made with this feature:
Bottom Line
Invideo is best for video content creators, including YouTubers, who need an easy, fast AI video editing program.
To see my full review of this program, check out this article: InVideo Review: An Easy-to-Use AI Video Generator.
What Are AI Content Creation Tools?
AI content creation tools are software programs that use machine learning and natural language processing technology to produce content on demand.
When you give one of these tools some input, it’ll produce content as output. For example, you can tell an AI tool to create product descriptions, social media posts, or articles through written or verbal instructions (e.g., “Write me an article about global warming”). The tool will respond by generating the content instantly, saving you time and energy.
Final Thoughts
AI content tools like the ones listed in this article can help you create everything from social media posts to email subject lines.
They’re incredible time savers and are worth incorporating into your content strategy if you need to produce plenty of content!
Common Questions (FAQs)
What are the benefits of using AI for content creation?
Speed, idea generation, and content optimization are among the many benefits an AI tool can provide when used for content creation.
Can AI-generated content be as effective as content written by humans?
Yes. Many AI tools can generate content that reads as if a human wrote it, especially if you use multiple tools in combination (such as Jasper with Surfer and Grammarly). The content will most likely be original and free of grammatical and spelling errors. However, you’ll always need to have a final look at the output. And remember that AI content is only as good as the prompts you give it.
Are you interested in creating content with AI? Check out these other great articles:
7+ Best AI Video Upscaling Software (Free & Paid)
