A Comparison of the Free Generative AI Tools

So the ultimate "winners" of which generative AI tools work the best for most people is yet to be determined. Those old enough to remember back to the 90s will recall that it took Google quite a few years to become the dominant search engine. Many of us used a variety of now-defunct search engines well before Google swept them all away.

That is likely to happen with generative AI tools. So the best ones today might not be the best tomorrow. And the technology companies that cater to lawyers have – and are working on – their own AI tools that will be specialized for the type of practice you have. I'm aware of quite a few of these tools that will burst on the scene within the next twelve months. Things are changing, my friend.

The big players right now are (some of these have paid upsell versions):

• OpenAI's ChatGPT
• Microsoft's Bing Chat
• Google's Bard (soon to be replaced by "Gemini")

But there are many more generative AI tools – and new ones are sure to emerge. Some have a mission, like Anthropic which has more powerful filters to protect human rights and try to contain the risks of the evil things that could be spun out of AI if filters weren't in place. Some are nefarious, just like the dark Web and I won't make mention of them here.

This Nielsen Norman Group just came out with this study that compares the three big players. And I'll leave it to you to read what they found. Just note that the free version of ChatGPT doesn't use the full Internet – at least not yet - as part of its LLM ("Large Language Model") and the results aren't necessarily current. Also, ChatGPT results are in text format. The other two tools can produce images and provide links in response to prompts. (I'll be posting a blog soon enough about the joys of using generative AI tools that specialize in images.)

Ethan Mollick – who has a great Substack newsletter called "One Useful Thing" about AI-related matters – recently shares some of his observations on the state of play.

Here's a quote from the October 3rd newsletter from Ethan that gives you a sense of the state of affairs: "Now, enough pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are in place that we can start to see what AI can actually do, at least in the short term. Many pieces are still missing, though, and this is a temporary state of affairs, AI continues to improve.

Even more importantly, the actual implications of what this phase of AI will mean for work and education is currently unknowable. It is unknowable to all of us who don't have insight into what the AI labs have planned, but it is also actually unknowable to them. I guarantee that the people at Google and OpenAI and Microsoft do not know the implications of AI for YOUR job or YOUR company or YOUR education, or even all the ways in which the systems they are building will ultimately be used, for good or bad."

Trivia fact: ChatGPT has a limit of 4096 characters for its prompts. Not that it matters because you'll be using reiterative prompts…