Intro

I like pushing AI to be less predictable. When AI assistants are less bland and more bold, they challenge my blind spots and nudge me to rethink.

So I asked one of the boldest AI experimenters I know, Alexandra Samuel, to share unconventional tips and tactics when she visited New York recently from Vancouver.

Alex, who writes about AI for the Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Business Review, surprised me with the scale of her AI efforts. She described creating 200+ automation scripts and building a personal idea database that helps with drafting pitch emails. Her quirkiest tactic? Using Suno to generate songs to explain complex concepts.

Her lively new podcast, Me and Viv, explores her unusual relationship with an AI assistant she trained to serve as her coach and collaborator. She interviews AI skeptics like Oliver Burkeman and Karen Hao to challenge her own embrace of AI. The Suno songs Alex generated serve as a recurring musical thread throughout the series.

In a recent episode, “I’m So Sycophantic,” Alex confronts Viv’s most irritating flaw: her pathological tendency to flatter Alex and agree with everything she says.

The show’s intriguing premise reminded me of another podcast I love, Evan Ratliff’s Shell Game, whose second season debuted recently. Both are excellent explorations of what it’s like to engage deeply with AI assistants, resourceful and flawed as they are.

Five tips from Alex

1. Use Suno to turn words into catchy music

What Suno is: An AI music generation platform for creating custom songs

Alex uses Suno extensively to create songs for her podcast about AI, treating it as a storytelling tool rather than just music creation.

“I’m like a monkey with a slot machine. It’s pretty typical for me to generate the same song 50 or 100 times, maybe even 200 times,” she says.

The iterative process helps her find the perfect version. She says Suno struggles with switching between male and female voices, musical styles, or languages mid-song. Alex suggests bringing your own lyrics to Suno for better results than relying on its built-in lyric generation. Here’s documentation she wrote up about how she uses Suno.

An alternative she recommends: work iteratively with an AI assistant like Claude to develop lyrics that you then import into Suno.

Try it for: Turning articles or announcements into short promo songs; creating engaging musical explainers; or generating a newsletter signup song.

Alternatives: Udio, ElevenLabs Music

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2. Coda: Create your own productivity hub

What Coda is: Software tool for creating customized documents and databases. I’ve written about how underrated Coda is as an alternative to other useful tools like Notion and Airtable.

Alex calls Coda an everything hub where you can build your own tools. New AI features make it easier to use and more flexible. Alex used Coda to design her own “pitch machine,” a sophisticated story tracking system.

She has one table in the pitch machine with all of her story ideas. Another table in Coda has all the publications she writes for, with editors’ names and contact info.

With the press of a button in Coda, she can combine multiple story pitches into a single Gmail draft while automatically updating tracking fields and follow-up dates. It took a while to set up, but now saves her time.

Who is Coda for? Alex recommends Coda for power users who like messing around with tech. She offers this test: “If you use XLOOKUP in Excel, then you should use Coda. If you don’t know XLOOKUP, you should use Notion. It’s like a nerd-o-meter.”

Try it for: Project and campaign idea tracking, managing a client database, or automated email or Slack message generation.

Alternatives: Notion, Airtable, Google Workspace, Obsidian

3. CapCut: Create social videos with AI help

What it is: Video editing platform with AI features

Alex uses CapCut, along with custom Python scripts, to create music videos for Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. She says she has mixed feelings about CapCut because of its TikTok/ByteDance ownership, but relies on it for now. She’s been working on a system for syncing the appearance of captions on screen to the moment when song lyrics are heard.

Try it for: Creating stylish, captioned social media videos or turning podcasts into videos.

Alternatives: Captions, Descript, or Kapwing

4. Claude + MCP: connect AI to your docs

What it is: AI assistant connected to external databases and tools via Model Context Protocol (MCP)

MCP servers let you connect sites and apps to AI platforms. That’s how Alex connected her Coda account to Claude.

Now that they’re linked, Alex can pose casual questions to Claude, which can then look for things in her Coda docs.

“I can actually just have a conversation with Claude and say, ‘Hey Claude, I just talked to an editor. They’re looking for articles about data privacy. Can you look at my Coda doc and see what story ideas I have that might be relevant?’”

She emphasizes security considerations: journalists covering sensitive subjects should avoid this type of experimental workflow if they’re protecting anonymous source information.

Try it for: Querying complex databases, finding relevant past work for new projects, analyzing patterns across your own documents, combining multiple data sources for insights

Alternatives: The Google Drive connector in Claude or ChatGPT; or a custom setup of NotebookLM.

5. Claude Code: reduce repetitive work

What it is: AI-powered coding assistant that runs locally on your computer. It helps developers code faster. It also helps non-programmers accomplish technical tasks using natural language prompts. You can use it to organize files on your laptop, create Python scripts, or make little interactive applications or games.

Despite limited formal programming training, Alex has written approximately 200 Python scripts using Claude Code.

She says, “Whenever you hear yourself with the deep sigh of, like, this is gonna be a drag, just go to the AI and say, hey, here’s this thing I have to do. Is there a way that could be made into a script?”

Alex’s scripts have helped her combine PDFs and generate time-coded captions for video. She also used Claude Code to build her own Firefox extension for a financial tracking app.

Try it for: Batch file processing, converting data, or whipping up browser extensions to solve specific-to-you problems.

Alternatives: Replit, Cursor, Claude Artifacts, Windsurf

p.s. CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism is launching the first fully-online bilingual (Spanish/English) M.A program. Learn more and apply by December 5!

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