AI assistants Tools

AI assistants and augmentation tools.

12 tools evaluated. Ratings backed by published methodology.

ChatGPT

OpenAI's general-purpose AI assistant — the most widely adopted LLM, with serious privacy trade-offs journalists need to understand.

Caution

AI 2026-04-02 Free (GPT-4o mini)

Claude

Anthropic's AI assistant. Disclosure: this site was built with Claude.

Caution

AI 2026-04-02 Free (Sonnet 4

Consensus

AI-powered academic search engine. Ask a question, get evidence-based answers from 200 million peer-reviewed papers with a Consensus Meter showing scientific agreement.

Adequate

AI 2026-04-11 Free: 25 Pro searches/month (20 papers each), 3 Deep searches/month (50 papers each), 10 GPT-4 Pro Analyses/month, 10 Study Snapshots/month

DeepSeek

Chinese open-source LLM with strong reasoning capabilities. Free web interface. Open-weight models (MIT license) can be run locally to avoid Chinese data jurisdiction entirely.

Caution

AI Open source sensitive-reporting 2026-04-11 Web interface (chat

Elicit

AI research assistant for academic literature. Searches 138 million papers, extracts data, synthesizes findings — every claim linked to the source sentence.

Adequate

AI 2026-04-11 Basic (free): 5,000 one-time credits, unlimited search, summaries of 4 papers at once, chat with 4 papers

Google Gemini

Google's AI assistant. Deep Workspace integration. The hallucination problem is real.

Caution

AI 2026-04-03 Free (Gemini 2

Google NotebookLM

AI research assistant grounded in your uploaded documents, not the open web.

Adequate

AI 2026-04-02 Free tier: 100 notebooks, 50 sources each, 50 queries/day, 3 Audio Overviews/day

Make

Visual workflow automation platform connecting 3,000+ apps. Formerly Integromat. More powerful and cheaper than Zapier for complex multi-step automations, with a steeper learning curve.

Adequate

AI baseline 2026-04-11 Free tier: 1,000 credits per month, limited to 2 active scenarios

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft's free AI assistant powered by GPT-4 class models. Web search integration, image generation, and document analysis — no account required for basic use.

Adequate

AI baseline 2026-04-11 Free tier: access to GPT-4 class models, web search, image generation (15 boosts/day), no account required

Ollama

Run AI models locally — your data never leaves your machine.

Strong

AI Open source sensitive-reporting 2026-04-02 Free for local use

Open WebUI

Self-hosted chat interface for local and cloud LLMs. The privacy-first alternative to ChatGPT.

Strong

AI Open source 2026-04-11 Free and self-hosted

Perplexity

AI search engine with source citations — useful for research, controversial for how it gets those sources.

Caution

AI 2026-04-02 Free (limited searches, GPT-4o-mini)

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