Fourth of July has a way of sneaking up and then passing before you've done anything you actually planned to do with summer. The season arrives with genuine promise: longer days, outdoor concerts, festivals, the vague sense that this is the year you'll actually make use of it. And then Labor Day shows up. What are you doing between then and now?

This year, I decided to short-circuit that pattern by doing something I probably should have tried sooner: handing my summer calendar to an AI assistant and asking it to fill the whole thing before I had a chance to procrastinate my way through it.

It's time to start thinking about how to get ready for the summer. Here's how to use AI, no matter what age or stage of life you're in.

Making it count

Summer's finite nature is what makes it extra special. Those longer days and hot summer nights don't last forever, and you have precious little time to squeeze as much barbecue, bootyshaking and frivolity in and/or around boats and large bodies of cool water.

I used Claude AI to generate a plan for the summer that would make the absolute most of my time, right down to a daily routine that will leave me in better shape both physically and mentally. 

Claude created an interactive calendar packed with accurate dates down to the hour, designed to track my summer glow-up and get-togethers, with concert, beach and restaurant recommendations.

For fitness-related goals, it scheduled weekly runs, bike rides, HIIT sessions, hikes and weight training sessions (you can be more specific in your prompt if you prefer different workouts), as well as the fun summer-related activities like beach days, taco Tuesday (scheduled on a Wednesday), bar crawls and museums. It even carved out blocks of time just for reading.

Summer reading hacks

Reading over the summer can either be a relaxing beach activity or a fiery gauntlet of boredom, doled out by a teacher who's just as bored with the material. AI tools like ChatGPT can generate reading schedules that make your learning goals more manageable and maybe even enjoyable.

I used ChatGPT to turn a summer reading list from a Los Angeles high school (Eagle Rock High, represent!) into a schedule that would give a student plenty of time to complete every suggested text on a long summer reading list, as well as a set of inspiring locations in which to read them.

Be warned: ChatGPT offered to create a "beautiful printable summer reading map of Los Angeles" from the schedule and list, but when I took the tool up on its suggestion, the work produced was not something I'd stick up on the fridge.

What's worse, ChatGPT's answer to my critique of the original ugly map was to give me a second, uglier map, and an ad for Vistaprint.

Claude AI, however, was more than up to the task and produced an interactive map with specific locations and dates, as well as deep notes on why each location enhanced the learning and reading experience of each text.

Song of the summer

It's still a toss-up as to whether the pop gods will bless us with any new genuinely well-produced, irresistible summer anthems this year. The Ying Yang Twins appear to be semi-retired, and TikTok mashups and remixes are never a sure bet. 

AI song-making tools such as Suno, which, according to the website, is a "web-based generative audio workstation that combines traditional DAW functionality with AI-powered music creation," can generate songs on the spot using any details you like.

I tried to use Suno to generate a summer anthem song with my and my spouse's names in the lyrics, but the results were hilariously bad. 

The in-browser tool says it can use prompts to create lyrics for the songs, but when I prompted Suno to "use the following names in the lyrics: Rachel, Robert," it created a song that opened with the phrase, "use the following names in the lyrics: Rachel, Robert," followed by roughly 2 minutes of absolute gobbledygook.

It has a nice beat, though.