Best AI for brainstorming

What 52 creators said they actually use for brainstorming, from podcasts and YouTube. Not benchmark scores. Updated Oct 18, 2026.

Short answer

For brainstorming, Claude (27 creators) and ChatGPT (24) are neck and neck.

Top tools for brainstorming

Creators who use or recommend each
1 Claude 27 creators

"You can take this stuff and put it into Claude, and then take how can I apply this to my life, or ChatGPT it, or to my investment thinking, or to my company."

2 ChatGPT 24 creators

"You are probably going to want to subscribe to either Google's Gemini product, Anthropic's Claude product, or OpenAI's ChatGPT product for 20 bucks a month. And you're going to want to, when you do serious work, pick their advanced think..."

3 Codex 5 creators

"I try to brainstorm what to make with Codex or something, and the AI is still too agreeable, man. Here's some ideas, is this good? It's a great idea. Are you sure it's a great idea? No, it's not a great idea."

4 Claude Code 3 creators

"My number one Claude Code use is using it as a tool to interact with my notes. I've got a fairly serious Cloud Code setup that I use with Obsidian. I use it as a true second brain, a thinking partner that asks me sharp questions, pulls r..."

5 Gemini 2 creators

"We use Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT quite a bit as well for the design and buildout phase and for inspiration on our renderings. For rendering design and coming up with inspiration for what we want something to look like, we use those thr..."

6 Grok 1 creator

"Grok 4.5 is just my workhorse. I just think that everyone should just be plugging this into their current stack, connecting it to their tools, and seeing what it could do. I show no loyalty to any lab — I have them all — and when I tell ..."

7 Midjourney 1 creator

"We are going to look at Midjourney. The magic of Midjourney — I could make you guys believe I'm a good home designer or logo designer. Just using Midjourney, it makes me more creative than I really am."

8 Cursor 1 creator

"How I kind of started with the entire project is I just dumped everything out from my brain into Cursor. I'll actually kind of demo it for you now. But really what I just kind of did — I went like, 'Okay, I want to create a printer where..."

Models creators name for brainstorming

Claude Opus 3 creators
GPT 2 creators

Most creators name the app (like Claude Code), not the model, so these counts are smaller.

Best AI for other jobs

How this works: we read every podcast and YouTube transcript we track and note when a creator says they use or recommend an AI tool for a job. Each creator counts once per tool. Sponsored mentions are left out. More about Followed.