How did you vote in the “Keep Elon in the CEO Job" poll? Or are you already long gone? 

The metaverse seems to have had a teachable moment with the FTX disaster. We’re seeing signs of improvement. But the real story of this week is tools. Tools that will use AI to become your Jiminy Cricket, sitting on your shoulder, chiming in on what you write or draw, or just helping you find that needle of knowledge in your haystack of data in the cloud. 

And finally, we’re thinking about how to grow our community (it’s in my Techonomy column that will be out later this week). Trust me. Community building is hard. It takes purpose, a special skill set and a lot of chutzpah. We interviewed many of our members for the column.

Most importantly, whatever you celebrate this season – even if it’s just a good movie or book – do it joyously. Happy holidays, from all of us at VEG.

Writing Tools

• Lex
  Lex is a simple-to-use idea generator that includes things like a title generator to suggest headlines for whatever you’re writing, and a question answerer to respond concisely to factual queries. There’s a paragraph writer that assesses what you’ve written and suggests a relevant next paragraph or bullet points that build on your argument. It can also point out potential blind spots in your writing by listing facts or issues you may have accidentally (or not) ignored. Plus it offers writing stats to track your productivity. Caplan calls it a partner for the writing process. He showed Lex in action by writing both limericks and Shakespearean verse. At this moment there are nearly 23,000 people on the waiting list to try Lex out. Or you can pay to join the Every community, a collection of blogs and posts read by 60,000+ folks, and get Lex now.
  
• Copy.AI
  Copy.AI gets you past the dreaded blank page. Enter a few sentences about what you’d like to create, choose the tone of voice you’d like to use (Bold, Friendly, etc.), and Copy.AI will put it into a framework that you can work with. The language generated by Copy.AI skews towards marketers. It’ll create a blog post by just feeding it your blog, a feature Caplan said lets him write the important stuff but then relegate certain tasks to AI. There’s a free trial version available. Caplan demoed the way he used it in a class of students from Austria. 
• Craft
  Craft, says Caplan, has the most attractive implementation of any of the AI writing tools he’s seen so far. You enter “/” and it gives you some options for adding directly into whatever doc you’re already working on. It works on all platforms. You can use the AI feature to summarize or explain something; create an outline; write a pro/cons list; generate keywords or hashtags; suggest a title; add to something you’ve written; or translate your text into English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Korean or Japanese.
• Jasper and Postwise
  Caplan also mentioned Jasper and Postwise. Jasper is a general-purpose AI writer that does a yeoman’s job of marketing, but it wasn’t one of Caplan’s favorites because of its aggressive marketing language. (I used it and got solid but not terribly inspired results. It’s also expensive, clearly geared for enterprise.) PostWise is a tool that generates tweets. I could make jokes about “tools that generate tweets” but I’ll refrain. 
• ChatGPT
  ChatGPT, Caplan pointed out, is different from most others because it’s almost conversational. You can ask follow-up questions and have a back-and-forth with it. 
• TextSniper
  There it is: someone’s words of wisdom written on screen. But it’s embedded inside a video, a Powerpoint, an e-book, a PDF, or anything that has text on screen. Caplan likes TextSniper because it captures text from your screen, even when it’s embedded in graphics or movies. Available for Mac only. 
• Canva Docs 
  Canva Docs Is basically Google Docs with Canva embedded in it, which means you can make much more sophisticated documents. There are many templates that make it simple to embed videos, PDFS, charts, presentations, whiteboards and more. Good for sharing and collaborative works, too. Another new feature, Magic Write, uses AI to let you create some text that’s inserted into the document. 

Art Tools

• NightCafe 
  Most of you are familiar with DALL·E 2, Stable Diffusion and MidJourney, but Caplan showed us NightCafe, a new AI art generator that’s super easy to use, and that lets you choose among the various AI generation engines to create your work. Give it a prompt such as “a butterfly flying over Times Square” and apply an art style, and it will give you four renderings of that thought. You get a certain number of free credits to use. 
• Lensa.AI and Imagine
  Lensa.AI is a similar kind of tool that’s gaining popularity, and the alpha version of Imagine lets you turn your prompts into 3D artwork.

Making Sense of Data

AI is going to help us keep our act together as we gather more and more information. 

• Mem
  Mem is an AI-powered tool that calls itself “self organizing”. As you type, it’ll ferret out corresponding associations from deep within your information collection, whether that’s a person whose email you have or a note you took earlier. Bidirectional, you can also pull things into Mem to store and organize them.
• Tana 
  Part of a new breed of AI software called “Personal Knowledge Management” systems, Tana solves the problem of having to remember where you put things on your computer or mobile device. It creates a mesh network of your interconnected files. 

What would an end-of-year newsletter be without a scorecard for bad predictions? Here’s how things could play out in 2023 for the social media companies we love to hate.

• TikTok gets sued for hosting all of those death challenges. It gets itself banned in the US, first by the government (already happening) and then by schools and onwards. It also manages to lose favor with creatives everywhere as TikTok becomes more greedy.
• Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk will step down thanks to a popular tweet vote. He’ll find a replacement but will remain in complete control. You will finally be able to tweet while driving your Tesla. And the government considers running the next election by tweet.
• Facebook becomes the senior/boomer center to reminisce about the good ole days of social media and aging computer equipment.
• LinkedIn becomes a global HR Department with its own HR staff.
• Google invents its equivalent of GPT3 but not half as interesting because it won't train on competitors. 
• Wikipedia becomes less and less relevant but wins some big important prizes for remaining  the closest thing to an ethical standard on the web. 
• Reddit spreads a virus amongst its users that causes them to write about a rosier picture of the world.
• Instagram takes paradise and puts up a parking lot. Brand takeover.
• WeChat becomes the holy grail for developers who want to create an American version of this mega platform.

How High Can the Metaverse Go? 
It was only a matter of time. Pax.World is a new metaverse social space that lets you buy land and build your own community in the metaverse. It makes perfect sense that one of their first partnerships is with Cannaverse. Together they’ve partnered to build Cannaland, a global marketplace on the blockchain for all things cannabis. 

Not Quite the Twilight Zone but…

With Dyson’s Zone you can listen to your favorite tunes and keep your air purified while terrifying everyone on your flight. 

The Metaverse Gets a Sir
Once his final tour comes to an end in 2023, Elton John sets off for Roblox for a 10-minute virtual live performance of Elton John Presents: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road.