After a few decades of tinkering, AI is beginning to have its moment. People may find it terrifying, overhyped, incredible, or boring. Which people are correct remains to be seen, but the fact remains that it’s likely to be everywhere in short order. 

There’s a few problems all crashing into each other: it’s nerdy, it’s moving at an incredible pace, some people see it as a threat, some see at as a messiah, and some see it as smoke and mirrors. For these reasons (and more), it’s becoming uniquely difficult to follow the progress. Even if you’re enthusiastic about it, keeping up with AI development is exhausting. If you’re less enthusiastic… well… that’s what I’m hoping to address here. 

I see a lot of people interested about AI, but most I talk to don’t go beyond that. It’s on the radar, but we’re all busy and have more pressing matters to focus on. For this reason, I wanted to make something for non-nerds in the mildly-interested-but-not-fully camp. Nothing crazy or life-changing, just something to give you a taste of what’s going on and (hopefully) spark an idea or two so that you can use it to solve one of your problems.

That’s sorta what this is all about. I use AI to solve the basic problems in my life; the silly, stupid, nagging issues that you might have too. We don’t need to get technical at all to learn how to use AI to help our lives run just a touch smoother. It’s not necessarily difficult, it only requires that we think a bit differently.

LearnGPT is a small personal project of mine whereby I hope to show you how I use AI to solve my problems in the hopes that you can find solutions for yours. I’ll be using ChatGPT (one of the many flavours of AI) to knock down a bunch of annoyances I run into from day to day, and I’ll walk you through how it all works. 

Project ground rules 

Before we begin with this, let’s lay out how this is all going to work:

1. While AI comes in many flavours, this project will only focus on ChatGPT–the text-based chatbot. 
2. If you want to play along and try the tools we make, you’ll need an account from OpenAI (the free tier will do).
3. If you want to adjust the tools we make and customize them for yourself, you can merely copy the instructions in the posts and paste them directly into a ChatGPT prompt.
4. If you want to create a GPT so you always have convenient access to it without having to paste it in each time, you will need to upgrade to the paid plan ($20/month). This is not necessary, but does make things a bit more convenient.
5. We will not be making one million dollars, curing cancer, or disrupting the global economy. Despite what many AI hype charlatans would have you believe, this stuff is very cool, but nobody is going to be creating million dollar businesses with it just yet.
6. Only super stupid, basic ideas will be explored. We won’t be building apps or starting a digital marketing firm. 
7. Only useable ideas will be tabled. No pie-in-the-sky ideas that mightwork… we’ll build everything we talk about, and you’ll be able to try them all, or remix them however you please
8. No, I didn’t use ChatGPT to write all of this. I used different types of AI for a few things (like banner images), but the truth is I enjoy the writing, so I didn’t offload that part of the job. You’ll probably find the odd spelling error or grammatical disaster, which is the telltale sign an over-caffeinated human wrote it.
9. I will mostly be referring to ChatGPT as a “robot” or a “robot buddy” but I don’t mean that in the literal sense. It’s just to simplify things. The actual Robot AI comes later. 
10. The point of this is mainly to stop thinking like a Google-user and start thinking like an AI user. Poke and prod at the thing to learn what it’s good at, and what it’s bad at. Do that long enough and you’ll start to see your every day problems a little differently. Maybe there’s something you do all the time that can be offloaded to this tool. You won’t know until you try.