The humble screenshot might be the key to great AI assistants
If you want to make the most out of a world increasingly filled with AI tools, here’s a habit to develop: start taking screenshots. Lots of screenshots. Of anything and everything. Because for all the talk of voice modes, omnipresent cameras, and the multimodal future of everything, there might be no more valuable digital behavior than to press the buttons and save what you’re looking at.
Screenshots are the most universal method of capturing digital information. You can capture anything — well, almost anything, thanks a lot, Netflix! — with a few clicks, and save and share it to almost any device, app, or person. “It’s this portable data format,†says Johnny Bree, the founder of the digital storage app Fabric. “There’s nothing else that’s quite so portable that you can move between any piece of software.â€
A screenshot contains a lot of information, like its source, contents, and even the time of the day in the corner of the screen. Most of all, it sends a crucial and complex signal; it says I care about this. We have countless new AI tools that aim to watch the world, our lives, and everything, and try to make sense of it all for us. These tools are mostl …