Tools That Make a Difference: Jeremy Caplan on AI and Productivity

Every morning brings news of another AI tool promising to revolutionize your workflow. But which tools actually deserve your attention? How do you separate the genuine game-changers from the hype?

In this episode of AImpactful, we’re joined by Jeremy Caplan, whose insights have helped thousands navigate the complex world of digital tools. As the creator of Wonder Tools, a newsletter with over 50,000 subscribers (and one of our top 5 favorite newsletters!), Jeremy generously shares his knowledge about which tools actually make a difference in our daily work.

What makes Jeremy’s perspective particularly valuable is his unique background: as both the Director of Teaching and Learning at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and a former Time Magazine reporter, he brings a refreshingly practical approach to evaluating AI tools. He’s not just testing these tools in a vacuum – he’s using them in real educational and journalistic contexts.

In this engaging conversation with host Branislava Lovre, Jeremy shares:

Key Insights:

• His tried-and-tested four-point framework for evaluating new AI tools
• Practical ways educators can integrate AI into teaching while keeping the human connection alive
• Real-world examples of multimedia and AI tools that genuinely boost productivity
• How AI can amplify (not replace) human creativity

What makes this conversation special is Jeremy’s focus on practical applications rather than theoretical possibilities. He offers concrete guidance on:

• Essential tools that deserve a spot in your professional toolkit
• Ethical considerations that every AI user should keep in mind
• Smart strategies for staying authentic while leveraging AI capabilities

Jeremy’s insights are especially valuable if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the constant stream of new AI developments and need practical guidance on what’s truly worth your time.

Episode Details:

• Duration: 31 minutes
• Guest: Jeremy Caplan – Director of Teaching and Learning at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, Creator of Wonder Tools newsletter
• Host: Branislava Lovre
• Format: Video podcast

Perfect for: Educators, journalists, content creators, and anyone looking to make smart, informed decisions about their AI tool adoption. No technical expertise required – just a curiosity about making technology work better for you.

AI Usage Notice: In preparing this introduction and the episode transcript, AI tools were used with careful human oversight and editing. We believe in transparency regarding the use of AI in our work.

Branislava Lovre: Welcome to Aimpactful today, we will talk about AI, productivity, journalism and education. Our guest is Jeremy Caplan, a journalist and educator who helps journalists around the world develop new projects. Welcome, Jeremy.

Jeremy Caplan: It’s a pleasure to be here.

Branislava Lovre: We’ll talk about your career and important projects, but let’s start from the beginning. When did your interest in AI begin?

Jeremy Caplan: I’ve been fascinated by AI for the past year and a half. I would say, it’s been a fascinating and fast changing period. With first the ChatGPT tool emerging as kind of a magic answer box. What seemed to be a, an impressive array of capabilities, and that’s only multiplied in the period since with all sorts of new tools incorporating AI into so many of the different tools that we use for our work. So it’s just been an exciting period of dramatic growth for AI.

Branislava Lovre: In 2022 we had a huge hype regarding AI, especially generative AI, and we had both skeptics and early adopters. What is the situation now?

Jeremy Caplan: We still have skeptics, and we still have early adopters who are adopting the newest features. The newest capabilities, newest tools. We still have people who are kind of in the middle trying to figure out what the landscape looks like. And I think for the early adopters, there’s an incredible array of different options to choose from, from the different chat, sort of live chat platforms like Gemini and Claude and ChatGPT and Copilot, as well as Perplexity to the tools that are baked into a lot of the other tools that we use for our, creating documents for example, Coda and Notion and Craft and Google Docs, all now incorporate AI in various different ways. Presentation tools incorporate AI in various different ways, like Gamma and Beautiful.ai and Pitch.com

And, so we have AI tools at our fingertips in a whole range of new areas beyond just the chat AI tools. And that means for those early adopters, there’s so many different ways of incorporating AI into their workflow every day. For those who are concerned or nervous about adopting AI, they’re encountering AI in all sorts of places that they didn’t expect to find it or didn’t realize it was going to be a part of their workflow. From meeting transcripts and AI agents in meetings that we’re attending to AI capabilities in note tools and email tools and writing tools and presentation tools. And so, for people who are concerned or skeptical or are wary of AI tools, there’s a lot to be wary of and concerned about. And for early adopters, there’s a lot to be really excited about and to be experimenting with. And then for those in the middle, there’s just a tremendous amount to be keeping up with because it’s changing so quickly. New tools are being launched every week and new capabilities are being added.

And that means there’s a lot to figure out, a lot to understand. Each tool operates slightly differently. So, there’s a lot of questions people have and a lot of uncertainty as to how best to incorporate AI into the work that they’re doing. It’s not always clear what the best usage of AI might be, how it may be used most effectively or efficiently or creatively. There are some ethical questions that linger for people appropriately and, so for those people in that middle of the pack with questions or or some hesitation, there’s a lot to be yet to be explored still.

Branislava Lovre: You have incredible knowledge when it comes to AI usage and implementation and you share a lot of that in your newsletter, which is one of my top five favorites. Why did you decide to start the Wonder Tools newsletter, considering how time consuming it is?

Jeremy Caplan: I do spend a lot of time on it and it is a passion project for me that I started early in the pandemic in April of 2020 specifically, and I started it because I realized that there was so much out there that people were curious about and were eager to learn more about and tools, the sites, the apps, the web resources, the web services that I was really excited about and that I was also learning about, I realized there were a lot of people out there that maybe didn’t have the time to explore those tools or were curious but didn’t know about those tools and would benefit from them. And I realized there was an opportunity there for me to be of service to people, to my colleagues professionally, to some of my friends, and then to general people out there who I didn’t yet know, who still might benefit from the exploration that I was doing. And I felt like I could share that exploration and share what I was finding useful and what I was finding about how to use the sites, not just what the sites were, but how to use them effectively. And examples of people using these tools creatively.

And I found that I was sharing that kind of information with people informally just on a 1 to 1 basis. And I felt like this was an opportunity to share it on a one-to-many basis by putting it into a newsletter form. And I also, I’ve always been a person who likes to experiment and try things out. And so, I wanted to try out the process of, writing this in a regular way, in a consistent way. And as a journalist, I was used to, writing for editors so writing for a publication at Time Magazine and then at other periods, other publications. And I liked the idea of trying to be my own editor in a sense, and have my own freedom to publish when and how and where I chose to. And so those were some of the motivations for me, in launching this, and over the four plus years since then, it’s been a learning journey.

I’ve learned about what people find useful and interesting. I’ve learned about what I can do feasibly and efficiently with this as a side project, because my primary focus is on working as an educator at the City University of New York at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. And so that’s my primary focus. And this is a kind of passion project where I can experiment with learning new things and sharing what I learn in different ways and trying different formats for the posts, incorporating video or incorporating audio and structuring the posts in various different ways to try to be as useful as possible for people who are generally time strapped and who are doing a lot of different things and who are eager to understand how to use the tools or what tools might be interesting, but who also have very limited time and don’t necessarily want all of the details about everything.

And so that’s been a good, it’s been a good process for me to learn about working efficiently in this way and writing efficiently and effectively. And, it’s given me an excuse and an opportunity to continue exploring because now I feel like I can explore on behalf not just of myself, but of other people who might benefit as, as readers. And sometimes in many cases, the tools are AI related tools, but not always. Sometimes there are still other tools like Google Docs and Google Slides and Google Sheets, which are incorporating AI a little bit, but are still basically non-AI digital tools at their heart. And those kinds of tools still are useful for readers and for people in general. So, I’m continuing to explore a wide range of, sites and apps, and hopefully creating some useful resources for people.

Branislava Lovre: What criteria do you use when evaluating tools, especially AI tools for your newsletter?

Jeremy Caplan: I would say there are four core things. Is it relatively easy to use? Because again, most people I find have limited time. They have multiple responsibilities and they don’t necessarily want tools or sites or apps that are very, very time intensive, costly in terms of time intensive. They also don’t necessarily have huge budgets for tools. I’m not generally focused on enterprise level, very, very costly tools. Once in a while, there’s an exception. But if it’s something is extremely valuable but generally very low-cost tools. So, tools that are relatively easy, tools that are free or relatively low cost, tools that are mostly aimed at individuals because not everyone has the capacity to have their whole company use this whole different enterprise software.

I also am interested in tools that make a real difference in our workflow in some way that help us be productive or be creative. These are tools that are writing tools, editing tools, presentation tools, creativity tools, tools that let us publish and share information, create video and audio and new ways, tools that help us move through our email more effectively and more efficiently in our task lists and our project management list. Because those are the things that we encounter on a daily basis that affect the work we do, whatever kind of work we’re doing, whether we’re teaching or doing journalism or working in some other way with information and ideas, we are encountering a variety of steps in our workflow, and some of those steps introduce friction and slow us down and mean that we have to spend a lot of time on menial tasks, like hunting down an email or putting together a laundry list of information or transcribing a meeting. For example, is a menial task that a lot of people have had to do until we can use our AI tools that make that more efficient.

So those are some of the criteria. How much time something takes, how much it costs, how productive it helps us to be, and how creative it helps us to be, how efficiently we can use it as an individual and in general, it’s something that is accessible for people. So it’s already available. Once in a while I’ll write about a tool before people can, many people can use it while it’s very early, because I think it’s important for people to be aware of. They can keep an eye out for it and test it if they want to. But in general, the tools are available to people because if you read about something, you may want to test it. And I think it’s helpful for readers to be able to actually take action based on what I’m writing about.

So, those are some of the key criteria. And then finally, it has to be something I’m interested in because there’s obviously hundreds and even thousands of new tools launching each week. And, I can’t write about all of them. And it has to be something that I’m excited about or that I can use in my own workflow, or I can at least appreciate the value of directly so that I can act as a, you know, as someone who’s really testing this, trying it out, exploring it, using it so that I can be helpful. Provide a helpful service about that to the reader.

Branislava Lovre: Can you recommend some AI tools that everyone should try?

Jeremy Caplan: Sure, so I think the first slate of tools for people to try are the basic chat tools which are useful in a whole range of different contexts. So that would be ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot. I would also recommend in that in that slate Perplexity, which is really helpful for search purposes because it returns the citations of the information that’s finding it, provides helpful summaries and helpful follow up questions which help you kind of get to know a subject by following a chain of questions and go back to the sources for those who are doing research and learning about new subjects along those lines, Consensus is also a really helpful tool because it allows you to basically search millions of academic journals and professional journals of various kinds of research using natural language kinds of questions like, does writing notes with my hands make a difference, according to research from, you know, as compared with writing notes on a laptop like that’s a research question. And there’s been actually a lot of research about that subject. And by just posting that question, you can find information using Consensus, which will summarize the results, the research on that, but also point you to that actual original research citation so you can go and follow it up yourself. So those are some that are starting kinds of tools, from my perspective.

Branislava Lovre: Can you explain how multimedia tools can boost productivity and streamline workflows?

Jeremy Caplan: Multimedia tools are really powerful, so creating video for a lot of people, is really complicated and time consuming, and some people feel intimidated by that or don’t know how to do it. And so, tools like Kapwing, which allow you to take along raw video for example, from Zoom, of a panel or an event and turn it into a short, shareable social video. That’s an example of an AI tool that’s really powerful for creating social video, for example, or or paring down a long video.

Descript, also, in the multimedia realm is a great tool for generating a transcript of something, but also then cleaning up the audio, the background noise through studio sound, its background removal, background noise removal feature. And also, it allows you to remove the ums a from our speech. So kind of cleaning up the audio in multiple ways and has some other AI features which are great as well.

A relatively new AI tool that I find quite useful is called Hypernatural, and what that does is allow you to create, a video out of a link or out of an audio material or out of a podcast recording or virtually anything. And it turns it into a really nice short video. And the distinction it has from some other AI tools is that it actually will generate new images based on the audio, video link, whatever material you give it, so that it’s not just playing already existing images, it’s actually creating custom images to match the material in your, in your material for the video. And it allows you to pick the styles and generates captions for you. It basically generates a ready to share video, which you can then customize and edit and works quite well. So those are a few examples in the multimedia realm

Branislava Lovre: Is there any specific tool you would recommend for improving writing besides ChatGPT?

Jeremy Caplan: There are a lot of great tools for this. There’s a tool called Lex, which has some really nice features where you can ask it to look for specific kinds of things like cliches or repetition, redundancy. It also does a great job of kind of giving you alternative headlines or subject lines, too, writing an email or writing a headline for something. There’s a tool called Wordtune that will give you examples of something you’re writing about. It will, and even allow you to inject humor or inject analogies into something you’re writing. And so, it has a variety of specific capabilities that are useful for writing, that are nice. There’s a tool called DeepL which is a translation tool, one of the best translation tools. That’s good for writing if you ever have to translate something. But there’s also something, a sub part of that now called DeepL Write. Where you can paste in some text and it will give you a few different options of how you could word that same sentence or group of sentences. And you can not only get suggestions for individual words within that block of writing, but actually suggestions for alternative ways to phrase a sentence. So, for kind of sentence level writing guidance, that’s a useful tool.

QuillBot is another tool that does a little bit of that, and that can be used as a plugin as well. And then there’s a tool called Blaze, which is a tool where you can basically give it some of your past writing and it will basically make some suggestions of how you could, for example, turn something you’re writing into a social post or X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or some other social platform, for example. So those are some examples of some useful writing tools.

Craft.do is a great notes and document tool that I like a lot. And Craft has a really nice AI capability that, just recently, began enabling you to write custom prompts, you can essentially create a prompt that describes a way in which you want the AI to look at yours writing. And then any time you write something in Craft, you can highlight that piece and then ask the AI to check it for X, Y or Z, whatever kind of specific thing you want it to look for. And that can be useful as a kind of editing partner when you’re working on anything that you’re writing in that particular tool craft.

These are some examples. And then, of course, Claude and ChatGPT have really strong writing capabilities. And so using them not just to generate new writing, but to actually edit existing writing or to make suggestions or give you feedback, is a powerful way for writers to approach using these platforms because we don’t always have access to a professional editor to look at every passage we’re writing. Right? And we may, as writers, feel comfortable doing the original writing. And in general, I think we should do as much of our own writing as we can. For the most part, because we want to retain our voice. But I think it can be helpful to have an AI editor have a look at that, to give you input that you can then decide to incorporate or not to incorporate, or you can incorporate in your own way, so that we’re not delegating fully the process o the AI, we’re instead using the I as an assistant, just as we might use a Thesaurus or a dictionary, in a little bit more powerful way to give us some editing input. So those are some of the tools that I would recommend in that realm.

Branislava Lovre: What is your opinion on responsible and ethical usage of AI, and how should we label AI generated content?

Jeremy Caplan: Well, the first rule is we should do as humans what people are expecting we’re doing fully as humans ourselves. So if you’re in a conversation with someone in, they’re expecting that you’re talking to them having an AI kind of avatar replace you or having someone else dictate for you what you would be saying to them in that human conversation, that seems problematic. So, in other cases where people are expecting us to respond as humans and so I think in those cases we should respond as humans and be human in our engagements with other people. That’s one thing. And when it comes to writing, I generally think when we’re writing something where, again, people are asking for our human input, we want to make sure we’re providing that human input. We may be using AI to kind of get ideas or to help us refine the writing, but I don’t in general think we should be using the AI to replace ourselves as writers.

I think there are some kinds of, I’m going to qualify that by saying there’s some kinds of writing where it’s not about the writing, it’s about the information, right? If you’re filling out a report for a bureaucratic document, you have to file to account for something. And there’s no one really concerned with the writing. It’s just about filing the information for a bureaucratic file. That’s a case where, okay, if I can write that information into the form for you, that’s probably okay, assuming there’s no rules or restrictions against it in that specific context. But in general, when we’re writing a letter to a friend, you know that those kinds of things, we want it to be our human selves.

I think another key ethical consideration is transparency. If we’re using AI to generate an image and we should let people know that that’s generated by AI, or if we’re generating a voice that’s not our own voice, probably we should let people know that transparently so that there’s not confusion people have or people don’t feel like they can’t tell when it’s a human speaking or they AI speaking. I think we should be transparent about that and we should explain for people’s just understanding how we’re using AI, if we’re in the news organization, for example, and we’re using the AI to do some analysis, just explain how we’re using AI and where we’re using AI and where we’re using humans. Because research, recent research has shown that people actually are assuming that people are using the AI in some cases more than they actually are.

So those are a couple of considerations. I think we also should be careful to not assume perfection in AI tools that are actually probabilistic kinds of tools. They’re using algorithms to make assessments about what likely words might make sense in a certain context, or what image might make sense in a context. But they’re not perfect, and they make errors repeatedly of various different kinds. And because of that, we should not assume that the AI can be used unsupervised. In other words, there should always be a human in the loop, as we say. So, if we are creating some sort of content and we’re using the AI as part of that content generation process in any way, we should make sure that we’re validating the information, checking the information, making sure the information is accurate, making sure the AI isn’t incorporating some unrelated, irrelevant or inaccurate information, because it has done that and will continue to do that’s the nature of these systems.

Part of the reason these systems are so creative is that they can make a lot of interesting things up and they can combine things that in some cases make for really interesting combinations, but in other cases can infect material with inaccuracies. And because of that, we have to make sure that there’s a human in the loop and that we are not letting our processes slip such that information is going directly from an AI tool to a reader or a viewer or a listener without any human intervention. Because that’s where we’re going to find at some point, either A, degradation of overall quality and connection and relationship, or B, inaccuracies, errors, problematic material, offensive material, or a combination of both A and B. So that’s why we need a human in the loop. We need transparency, and we need to be thoughtful about the contexts in which we use AI and the context in which we decide not to use AI.

Branislava Lovre: Should educators use AI to prepare their materials, and do you use creative AI tools in your teaching?

Jeremy Caplan: Yes. I think in general, educators should use AI, just like we should use all of the other tools we have at our disposal, because we have a very important mission, which is to be as engaging and effective as educators as we can. And, we should not rule out any kind of tool in general before we really understand what its capabilities are, where its strengths are, and how it can be helpful in helping us accomplish a really important mission, which is to help educate people. And we should be very thoughtful and careful about how we use AI.

I’ll give you some examples of how I think it can be useful. Number one, when we’re thinking about lesson plans, we’re thinking about how we’re actually structuring an engaging session. We can provide some context to an AI assistant that tells it the context, the topic, the subject matter, and asks it for some ideas about what are some activities we could do, what are some ways in which we could convey this information creatively and interestingly, engagingly. Given that we have 50 minutes and we have 14 students and we want to accomplish these three learning outcomes and we want to create activities that are engaging and we can get ideas for what those activities might be or how we might present that information or how we might structure that lesson plan.

And then we, as the educator, as the decider, can say, you know what, three of those are not really going to work given this context, and the fourth one, I’ve already done that before, but the fifth one, I think I could try that approach and incorporate these elements. And then I can ask a follow up question for some other ideas. Let’s say we’re going to play this game, this learning game, and we’re going to ask several questions because we’ve got 10 minutes for that activity. I want three of the questions to be about this topic. How could I phrase this question to make it really interesting and engaging and make it clear, and what would be the potential answer options that I might expect so that I can prepare some feedback for students who answer those questions in those ways so I can use it as a collaborator and lesson planning, for example.

I can also use it as a collaborator in generating examples. I’m trying to explain this complicated concept of a fusion of nuclear fusion, or I’m trying to explain this, this concept of, this particular cognitive bias of recency bias. And, or I want to explain to students what a futuristic is and I want some examples of heuristics that people use in everyday life, or I want analogies. So, what’s an analogy that would explain a heuristic to somebody that’s really interested in sports or that’s really interested in the arts, or that’s really that’s a native Spanish speaker, French speaker, German speaker. And I want to use an example that’s relevant or in, in that language. We can use it as a partner in generating examples, in generating analogies, even generating anecdotes.

We can also use it as a generator of examples of bad work. So we’re teaching students to write. We can ask it to generate examples of run on sentences, or of arguments that are ad hominem arguments, or sentences that just have faulty logic in various different ways. And we can ask the AI to help us generate those examples, which can be time consuming. Or if we’re creating a quiz, a formative assessment. We can ask the AI to help us generate alternative options answers, wrong answers, essentially to the questions that we come up with, which again, can save us time so we can focus on other aspects of our teaching.

We can also ask the AI to look at our syllabi and see if there are elements where we’re we have blind spots, we’re missing something or we’re not explaining something clearly, or that would explain something to people who have a learning disability. Is there a way we can elaborate on this part of the syllabus to make it more clear for someone who doesn’t speak this language or who has a learning disability or has some other special need? There are so many different ways in which we can incorporate AI, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We can have AI search through our material to help us find examples from our own notes and our own past documents. We can have the AI summarize class sessions for those who weren’t in attendance or translate transcripts of the class session for those who are learning our language and need some additional support. We can have the AI simulate different situations that are going to happen in a classroom. If we’re approaching a new kind of classroom for the first time, we can ask the AI to essentially role play with us so we can practice different situations that might emerge those are just among many of the ways in which we as educators can use AI.

I think there’s a tremendous, amount of assistance and help, we can get as educators from AI in doing our work even more effectively than we already do.

Branislava Lovre:  Can you share any upcoming or ongoing projects or initiatives that you are working on?

Jeremy Caplan:  I’m continuing to support creators all over the world who are creating their own new entrepreneurial projects, whether they’re creating newsletters or podcasts or new video channels or new niche news websites. I think that there’s a tremendous need in the world for more great journalism on subjects that matter to people, particularly under addressed subjects around the world. And I’m continuing to explore new ways to help people who are creating those projects, who often are juggling, not just creating a product that’s new, but also building an audience and monetizing in addition to all of the other steps to building and running and succeeding, thriving with a project.  I’m continuing to explore new ways to help people who are doing that.

In my role at the City University of New York. I’m also very interested in how we teach and how we can teach effectively, creatively, engagingly in this era, when distractions are all around us, when sometimes people aren’t able to come and be in the same physical space, when the subjects that we’re teaching have all kinds of new nuances, and when students are hoping for, expecting a certain kind of experience that’s engaging and may be different from a traditional classical classroom format. I’m very interested in pedagogy and how we teach these days and how we can teach more effectively, how I can teach more effectively and how I can help others teach more effectively. That’s an area of interest to me.

I’m really excited about seeing what I can do with Wonder Tools also, that’s a personal passion project and I’m excited to see how I can continue to try new things with it with, experiment with audio and video, experiment with new kinds of posts, how I can engage with readers and subscribers through some live events online and in person, and how I can collaborate with other creators in interesting ways for Wonder Tools so that I can learn from what they’re doing and help them do what they’re doing and bring our audiences together and approach subjects through a collaborative lens.

For example, writing a co-writing a piece with a fatherhood writer that’s aimed that’s about tools for parents, as a dad, I’m interested in collaborating with his other dad about sites and apps and tools that can really be exciting for kids. And so that’s an example of a collaboration. I’d love to do more of those kinds of collaborations with other kinds of writers and other kinds of creators. And I’m always interested in learning and learning new kinds of ways of working, ways of presenting information and ways of looking at the lives that we lead through a lens of wanting to make as much of our lives as we can.

 I’m really interested in productivity and finding meaning in life. And the intersection between those two things is a subject that I’m, endlessly curious about and reading a lot about and kind of the intersection between philosophy and productivity as an area of interest to me. I’ll continue to learn about those. So those are some of the things that I’m thinking about and excited about and working on and learning about and working and continuing to explore.

Branislava Lovre: You’ve watched another episode of AImpactful. Thank you. And see you next week.