Hugging Face lets you try what’s next in AI

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. Hugging Face is the best place to try thousands of free demo apps that show what AI can do. It’s an open-source community where developers test new models. It’s also an exciting digital playground where you can try out the most advanced new AI experiments for free. Generate stunning images Hugging Face gives you a great fast, free way to try multiple versions of the most-buzzed about new AI image-generation engine: Flux. This AI model renders remarkably vivid images. It has several distinctions over earlier AI image generation tools, including: Pick dimensions: Choose the horizontal/vertical ratio; not just squares. Show words. It can show text inside images. Other engines struggle w/ this. Short prompts work. No need for paragraphs to get a superb result.  Instantly remove an image’s background. Upload any image or take a Webcam picture. Seconds later, download a background-free image, with more reliable results than I saw with prior software tools. Useful for slides, posters, and other designs. [Alternatives: Adobe Express has a free background removal tool, no log-in required, and remove bg lets you try one for free]. Enhance an image Upload a blurry image and see it re-rendered instantly with sharp details. The viewer has a helpful scrub bar so you can easily compare the before and after.  Generate a gif Instead of searching giphy for an existing gif, make your own with a simple prompt. Useful for making less goofy gifs. Generate a detailed caption Get a precise, thorough caption for any image. This can help with alt-text, enabling those who use a screen reader to understand what’s in an image.  Preview an outfit Upload a photo or choose a sample image. Then press run to see how the outfit looks on your subject. Animate an image Upload a portrait photo. Then select a sample (or upload a) video that shows close-up facial movements. Press the animate button to see the portrait come to life with those expressions. Here’s my 3-second Lincoln example. Cut out an object Remove an object from an image with multiple elements. It’s more accurate and effective than generic background removal in that you can specify—with text—which object in the image to pull out, like this lamp. Translate a video Upload a video or audio file—or provide a video link—and request that the audio be translated into another language. Note: it’s processor-intensive and popular, so expect waiting time of at least a few minutes.  Alternatives: Captions and Kapwing also have paid tools for this. Do more with Hugging Face Join a user community. I joined Journalists on Hugging Face. It hosts resources for journalists and points to special AI applications, like one that injects AI capabilities into Google Sheets. Measure AI bias Explore potential biases in text-to-image models. The tool generates multiple images from a prompt, then analyzes the resulting gender, skin tone, and age of the generated subject. Useful for running your own bias tests. Explore AI ethics Thought-provoking explorations of issues raised by AI. Check out AI leaderboards See which AI chatbots rank highest among users, along with other functional and technical comparisons. My collection of favorite AI demo tools on Hugging Face. Caveats Wait time. Not all results will be instantaneous. The models share processing power so you sometimes have to wait a minute to see a result.  Can be overwhelming. With thousands of apps, it’s easy to get lost in the rabbit hole. And it can be hard to keep track of which apps you like. Creating a collection can be helpful. Here’s how. Here’s my collection. Technical names. Many demo apps have confusing technical names “FLUX.1 Dev ControlNet Union Pro” and other such monikers might not make sense at first. Fortunately, others do have clear names like “Finegrain Image Enhancer,” “Background removal” or “Flux Gifs.” Made for developers. The Hugging Face community is primarily for those with technical skills in machine learning, natural language processing, and other AI domains. So on some pages you’ll bump into jargon that’s obscure for those of us who lack relevant technical knowledge. If you’re mainly interested in trying out AI apps, stick to the Spaces section, where the apps are on display.  Hugging Face Mobile You can use the mobile version of Hugging Face to quickly switch back and forth between all sorts of bots—from storytellers to philosophers, each instructed to communicate distinctly. You can also generate images or pursue ChatGPT-like queries with the best open-source models without any cost. There’s a dedicated iOS app. Or access it from other phones at huggingface.co/chat. Alternative: The Poe app is an excellent alternative for trying out specialty bots created by comm