Choose the input mode
Choose the input mode
Four requests land on your desk in the same hour. Each one has material that exists as an artefact — a photo, a document, a recording — and you have an AI assistant that accepts text, images, audio and documents.
Pick the request where handing over the artefact itself is clearly the right first move — and check why the others are weaker uses of the tool.
Hint
Ask two questions: does the material exist as a file, and does its layout or wording carry meaning that a retelling would lose?
The strongest use is the one where the model can read the source itself instead of your version of it.
Why this is the answer
Multimodal input pays off when fidelity matters and the source exists: a whiteboard photo keeps the structure that a retyped list destroys. When the material is already text you can copy, use text; when it is a general question, no attachment is needed; when it is your memory, accept that you are summarising a summary. Match the input to what the task actually needs to preserve.