From photo manipulation to beer recipes, AI is finding its way into everything

I think it’s safe to say that 2017 has been the year of artificial intelligence. It seems every day a new startup was entering the field to offer a new twist on marketing, photo manipulation, or voice assistants that utilized artificial intelligence technology. Add to that the fact that more and more business leaders see the next big thing being AI and you have an almost endless amount of startups and thought leaders looking into what AI can be injected into.

While a lot of this in fields like machine learning for marketing and financial services, there are plenty of others out there using the advancements in technology for more “hands-on” applications.

Surely, you’ve heard of Prisma by this point, but it is so much more than just a photo editing tool. It actually uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to completely recreate the image using the style of your choice. Recently, Prisma partnered up with meme generation app, GagBot, to offer even more in the way of artificial intelligence on their platform. GagBot uses AI and objection recognition to determine funny quotes or meme-style text to add to the photo. It isn’t perfect, but that’s the beauty of AI, it should always be improving as more data is collected.

Prisma isn’t the only photo manipulation tool on the market, however. You also have companies like DeepArt.io which is using algorithmic learning to manipulate photos in the styles of famous artists like Van Gogh and Picasso. By using object recognition and neural networks, the system is able to analyze the style of a famous piece of art and apply it to any photo a user uploads. This service helps show that AI is able to look at something like style without taking into account something like subject matter.

Another creative field seeing a rise in artificial intelligence is web design. Over the past 15 years, developers have continued to improve the web design experience to make starting a website more accessible to the average store owner or entrepreneur. First it was content management systems like WordPress making it easier, then the rise of drag-and-drop templates through companies like Squarespace and Wix increase ease-of-use even more.

Now, we’re starting to see companies looking into using artificial intelligence and machine learning to make websites in mere minutes, based on popular sites and user input. Companies like TheGrid and uKit are both looking at artificial intelligence questions in the field of web design. TheGrid analyzes countless websites in an effort to create the perfect website for you, with uKit taking a similar approach. Using AI and responsive design, uKit analyzes other websites in the same realm as yours to see what is popular and builds based on that. You can then use the uKit CMS to tweak and play around with the design if you so choose.

And then there is Intelligent X, which sounds like some sort of future Fortune 500 turbo-business enterprise solution, but in reality, they’re just working on making a better beer, which is arguably just as important as anything business related. By using a Facebook chatbot, Intelligent X gathers data from customers about their different alcohol offerings and feeds that into their home-brewed AI system that analyzes customer’s opinions and thought on their beer. The master brewer then looks at the results of this the data to determine the future of their different recipe – one example is that their pale ale has increased the amount of hops used based on user data, which could be due, in part, to the rise in beer drinkers preferring a more hoppy experience.

Whether talking about beer, web design, or photo manipulation, it is very obvious that artificial intelligence is on the rise in all sectors – and not just big business. While, yes, big business will always take the spotlight and be a driving factor in advancing technologies, including AI, sometimes it is nice to just take a step back and appreciate some of the smaller players that are finding their own areas to excel in.