Straight answers to the questions everyone's quietly googling — each one in under a minute of reading, no fluff, no "it's complicated".
Both are excellent general assistants. ChatGPT has more features (voice, images, a huge ecosystem); Claude is stronger at long documents, careful writing, and has a stricter privacy stance. Try both free before paying for either.
Free is genuinely enough for casual use. Pay (~€23/mo) only if you hit usage limits on real work, need heavy file/image features, or your job now depends on it. If you mostly write, compare Claude first.
Ask what you're making: images as the product (art, concepts, striking visuals) → Midjourney. Social posts, presentations, and marketing material → Canva, where AI is built into templates you can actually use.
Google penalizes unhelpful content, not AI content. AI-drafted posts that you edit, fact-check, and enrich with real experience rank fine. Mass-publishing raw AI output is what gets sites buried.
Yes for prototypes and simple internal tools — tools like Replit build working apps from a description. Real products with payments, accounts, and edge cases still hit walls where experience matters. Validate first, invest later.
The magic-words era is over — modern models understand plain language. What still matters: giving context, showing an example of what you want, and iterating. That's communication, not engineering, and you learn it by using the tools.
Depends on the plan, not the AI. Free consumer tiers may use your inputs for training (often with an opt-out); business tiers generally don't. Rule of thumb: nothing on a free plan you wouldn't email to a stranger.
Start with one general assistant and use it hard for a month. Add a specialist (images, coding, video) only when you clearly feel the generalist's ceiling. Stacking subscriptions on day one is the most common money waste.