I’ll admit it. I’ve gone down a rabbit hole. But it’s an incredible one and I’m not sure I’m coming out for a while. There’s a few treasures here that I think are still undiscovered.
Ever since I helped my friends open a gym and promised them I’d create the technology to sell memberships and allow members to book onto classes, and then struggled with expensive fancy apps and then trying and failing to configure do it yourself software because it just didn’t do what I wanted it to, then one day just as a laugh, toyed with the idea that AI could help me program it from scratch… …yeah, I’ve been down a rabbit hole. And it’s amazing and fascinating and yes, there are treasures here and I want to tell you about one of them.
AI is now at a level that it can program from scratch pretty much any app you can think of. If you have an idea, AI can model it in software. But only if you can actually explain your idea.
And that’s a pretty weird thing to say. Of course, if you have an idea you can explain it, right!? That’s the idea behind ideas! You have an idea and it’s yours and if you want, but only if you want, you can tell someone. But not anyone. Someone you trust. Someone that won’t laugh at you. Someone that won’t steal your idea for themselves. And obviously, some ideas are so good that you won’t tell anyone about it, ever.
The problem with ideas is that when they are in your head, they are safe. You feel safe. They are perfectly formed and feel right and they help you make decisions and no one else knows your ideas and that is why you are right and they are wrong.
People even get famous for having ideas that belong to them. We write their ideas big on walls and put their name to it and they live forever. Well, until someone realises that the quote we’ve been saying and accrediting to this person didn’t actually say it, or worse, someone said it before them! Shock, horror, gasp!
It’s in these moments when you realise that it doesn’t matter who said it, much less who said it first. If it’s a good idea, then it’s a good idea and - ready…? An idea only exists if you share it. An idea isn’t real until you do. And good ideas have a nasty habit of escaping.
And that’s because ideas are only good ideas if you can explain them to someone else. And this gets us back to my story.
Since my gym technology has come into the world, after only spending three hours with AI (plus a bit more adding some spit and polish on it), it has helped my friends seamlessly and effortlessly open a gym from scratch, take membership and run classes than members book onto, and after only two weeks has built a £150k+ business for two people.
As a tech geek, software developer and programmer myself, this has knocked even me for six. I thought it was a toy and could sort of do things but not really. Well no, it can just actually do things. There’s a craft to it, yes, but it can help you make any idea real.
But that isn’t the story. This is the story…
After my realisation that the world had fundamentally changed, as usual, over a pint in my beloved Windmill pub, I decided to experiment and to push it.
Ok clever clogs, I said. If you think you can do anything, then let’s see how you fair with the fundamentals of a school. We have a process. It’s written down. And let’s start with something simple, like the school calendar.
So, in an hour I had a software tool that could create calendars but we have to do it manually. Then I thought, hmmm… why don’t I build AI into this tool that I built with AI that I used AI to explain how I could actually build it. And in half an hour, I had an AI that could actually build calendars for us in under a minute. Now this as an achievement of efficiency is not that impressive. I think we can create a calendar in about 30 minutes, so we’re only saving 29 minutes, and we only have to create one calendar a year, so why even bother? Well, I didn’t actually know at that moment, but I do now, and I know why because the calendars that the AI produced were absolutely crappy. They were too long or too short. They had staff days on a weekend (Hmm… maybe that’s a… nah, only kidding! …or am I…?) or they were even on random Thursdays etc etc. the point is, they were bad and pretty unusable.
So then I did this.
I took the AI generated crappy calendar and my prompt (which was written down by me, Cat and Michelle ages ago), and I asked AI why it was producing such crap.
It asked me to clarify why the AI calendars were crap, which I answered, and then it said this…
Ah! I see the problem. Your prompt isn’t specific enough. When you say X, the AI is interpreting this as Y, so it thinks it’s doing ok.
I was like, OMG! Like it’s my fault?!? I’m not the one creating crappy calendars! So in my anger I said, ok then smarty pants, if my prompt isn’t good enough then you write one!
And so it did. And I put the AI generated prompt into the AI that’s built into my software created by AI that I had explained by AI how to do it.
And it produced a perfect calendar.
So I went to my fridge and got a beer and watched football.
This morning, I woke up, not proud that I’d created an AI powered calendar generator, but that I’d realised something much more powerful about AI.
If we can’t explain to AI how to do it, we’re not explaining it well enough. AI in its very nature is best when we explain the ‘why’ not the ‘what’, so it can figure out the best way through the mess. This is the fundamental difference between a program and an AI. We have to start with why. Or if you’re a dad, you have to start with “wAI”.
AI will make us explain ourselves better. It will make our ideas real, or not. Crappy ideas will fail and good ideas will prevail.
I wonder if it will make us explain better, what it means to be human?
I’ll let you know…
Best wishes,
Gwyn
P.S. No, I didn’t use AI to write this, but who cares if I did?