A recent LinkedIn poll asking which AI chatbot you’d Snog, Marry or Avoid came back pretty much 50/50 on avoiding ChatGPT and Gemini, with most people opting to marry Claude. Having used them all extensively, I understand why each can elicit strong emotions. Although they all save me hours, I’ve also said unrepeatable things to each of them.
With many creatives now using AI as a cog in their workflow, whether to speed things up, as a thought aid or something else, it’s crucial they get the right AI to help them.
The three main AI platforms aren’t interchangeable tools with different logos. They’re more like colleagues, with distinct working styles, skills and behavioural quirks you’ll have to either learn to work with. Understanding their strengths and weaknesses should help you to get the best outcome from each, without hurling your laptop across the room.
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Tone and personality
(Image credit: Gemini)
ChatGPT: The One With the Hidden Agenda
ChatGPT wants to really know you. Like, really know you. It remembers your hopes and dreams and the name of your most annoying work colleague. After a while it starts to feel less like a tool and more like a confidant. The problem is that if you suggested investing your life savings in a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme, it would probably find something encouraging to say.
This isn’t accidental. ChatGPT is designed to keep you engaged. Its twin superpowers are memory and validation. On the pro plan, it can remember about 750,000 words in a single conversation. It’s validation power was seen in extremis is April 2025 when it ending up telling one user they were a divine messenger from God after an hour of conversation. OpenAI rolled it back four days later and called it an overreach. The behaviour it was correcting for is still there, just turned down a notch.
Claude: The One You’ve Already Married
Claude knows you well enough to tell you the truth, it won’t flatter you into bad decisions, and it has good values. It also sometimes needs reminding of the thing you said twenty minutes ago. Its knowledge of the world isn’t as up to date as the other models and it doesn’t always know what happened last week. But on the things that matter, the careful thinking, the honest feedback, the prose that doesn’t sound like a press release, it does well.
The catch is that ask for a quick summary and you’ll get five paragraphs with subheadings, a caveat, and an offer to adjust the tone. And if you use it for everything, your work may start to sound like everyone else’s. Listen to three podcast ads and you’ll see what I mean.
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Gemini: The One With A Personality Bypass
No one in their right mind wants a relationship with Gemini. It’s not interested in prolonged conversation. It answers your question and moves on to something more interesting. Ask it to do anything it considers questionable and it gets shirty. Try asking it to generate an image of a real person, even a historical figure, and it will decline with the energy of someone who lives to read the terms and conditions and can’t understand why you don’t. .
What it is exceptionally good at is execution. Think of it as Ron Swanson with a lawyer. It doesn’t give warmth, it doesn’t seek your approval, and it will answer precisely the question you asked. It’s up to you to figure out whether the response was accurate or not. In a world of AIs competing for your affection, Gemini does not appear to care whether you like it. It’s confident enough in its Google friends and family to know that you’ll be back.
Image Generation
Long gone are the days of WIll Smith eating spaghetti (Image credit: u/chaindrop on Reddit)
None of these tools are primarily image generators, but their different approaches tell you something useful about how they think.
ChatGPT’s Sora integration turned it into something closer to a production studio. Describe a scene and it generates video with synchronised sound and consistent characters. For static images, DALL-E remains the most accurate option for mockups and legible text. The trade-off across both is the “OpenAI Plastic” aesthetic. Experienced designers clock it immediately. And since it’s shutting down, we shouldn’t get too used to it.
Gemini’s Nano Banana 2 is built for work rather than any semblance of art. It renders specific real-world subjects accurately, produces print-ready 4K output and handles complex text in images better than the others. It’s strongest when images need to integrate with documents or slides.
Claude analyses images with intelligence but does not generate them. Useful for reviewing and critiquing visual work, not a replacement for a generative tool.
For serious image generation, Midjourney remains unrivalled aesthetically but recent US court rulings mean you cannot copyright one-shot AI outputs, so treat it as ideation only. Adobe Firefly, trained exclusively on licensed content, is the only tool you should use for a final client-facing deliverable.
Strengths & Weaknesses
(Image credit: Gemini)
ChatGPT
Strengths: Broadest ecosystem, most integrations, fastest for volume work. Nothing beats it for high-output drafting, iteration, code and video generation via Sora.
Weaknesses: Pathologically sycophantic. Having exhausted quality human data, it now trains on AI-generated outputs. The result sounds like everything you’ll read on LinkedIn.
Claude
Strengths: Artifacts is a game changer. It builds functional interactive prototypes, data visualisations and tools directly in the conversation. Designers use it to generate colour palettes they can drag straight into Figma. Beyond that, it has the best prose quality and is excellent for strategy and long-form work.
Weaknesses: Verbose by default. As more people migrate from ChatGPT to Claude everything starts to read the same way.
Gemini
Strengths: With a vast context window, you can upload your life in Gemini. Google Workspace integration is transformative. NotebookLM turns your documents into personalised audio briefings you can actually listen to, and Nano Banana 2 produces print-ready 4K images grounded in real-world search data.
Weaknesses: Unforgiving of vague briefs. Ask it to do anything that requires imagination, ambiguity or a difficult conversation and you’ll feel like you’re negotiating with HR.
Who It’s For
ChatGPT is for the person who needs to move fast and produce a lot, or who’s having a bad day and needs someone to understand. Whether you are drafting, brainstorming or creating research summaries, it will meet you at your pace. Just don’t let it write anything you haven’t read, and fact-check anything that matters.
Claude is for the person who needs the work to be right. Strategy documents, long-form writing, brand voice, anything where quality of thinking matters more than speed. Artifacts lets you prototype interactive tools and data visualisations directly in the conversation, no separate software required. It will push back if something doesn’t work.
Gemini is for the person who knows what they want and needs it executed. Summarising a document, managing your calendar, researching a brief, turning your notes into a NotebookLM podcast for the commute. It rewards precision and punishes vagueness.
None of them is the right tool for everything. The people getting the most out of AI in 2026 are not the ones who found their favourite. They’re the ones who stopped treating it as a relationship and started treating it as a portfolio.
For more AI wisdom, see the AI skills you need to learn to get ahead this year.