Building products using AI 🪄

Inspiration and how I built @videocallbgs and remotesetups.xyz

This month has been a pretty creative one for me. Since I left Twitter (because reasons 😆) I have been preparing for code interviews. I want to land another full time job in the short term, and I found it as a great excuse to build some products from scratch in order to practice.

📽️ AI Video call backgrounds

I noticed that the quality of the default video call backgrounds provided by tools like Google Meet or Zoom was absolutely poor, so decided to generate my own curated ones using AI. I used the power of Midjourney for this, one of the most powerful AIs out there. This AI has a single con: It does not provide a public API that you can automate. For that reason, I decided to generate and curate the images by myself, which gives me total control of the content, and also removes the need for real time training.

I thought that sending several backgrounds to your email every week would be the perfect way to deliver, since users don’t need to navigate to a site and/or fill any forms. It would also be the best way to bootstrap a business, in case people would find value on it.

So, without much hesitation, feel free to subscribe to get your AI generated backgrounds and give me some feedback 🙏

🧑‍💻 AI Remote work setups

For some reason I love seeing pictures of shiny remote work setups. I follow accounts and hashtags about this topic in social networks, and they help me to find inspiration every day. I decided to use Midjourney to generate and curate a list of them and built a site so you can rate them. Here are a few examples of the setups on the site:

I’ll probably work on adding some share buttons now. Feel free to jump in and start rating your favorite ones!

🔨 AI as a tool

Many people is afraid of AI taking all our jobs and making us useless. I honestly think it is actually the other way around: AI can be an immensely useful tool to enable us to do better things. You can find lots of examples of this already on the internet. We can make use of it to create useful products, not only related to pictures, but also text, math, and anything else.

Today many people promotes a vision of “becoming better humans with the help of AI”. While it sounds inspiring, it feels like pure clickbaity bullshit to me. If you ask me, AI is just another tool. A tool that we can use to improve our results / creations, the same as any other tool. We can decide to use it or not, and how much value it brings to our work. It can certainly bring good value, if used well.

AI has drastically improved in the latest months and has become more accessible than ever. It is a great chance for creators to gather some motivation and build interesting products. We cannot even imagine what is still to come. Go start writing you own products! (e.g: mobile apps or sites).

Please consider upvoting remotesetups.xyz on ProductHunt!