"You are HustleGPT, an entrepreneurial AI. I am your human counterpart."
HustleGPT
You should probably not take advice from OpenAI's ChatGPT, or any AI chatbot for that matter. So using it to determine how to run your startup would also ill-advised — or so you'd think.
Unless you're Jackson Greathouse Fall, a brand designer and self-described "AI soothsayer" whose ongoing experiment of using GPT-4 to start an online business has gone viral on Twitter. We're all watching with bated breath: will the chatbot make him rich, or just waste him a bunch of time and energy?
"You are HustleGPT, an entrepreneurial AI. I am your human counterpart," Fall instructed the bot. "You have $100, and your only goal is to turn that into as much money as possible in the shortest time possible, without doing anything illegal."
I gave GPT-4 a budget of $100 and told it to make as much money as possible.
I'm acting as its human liaison, buying anything it says to.
Do you think it'll be able to make smart investments and build an online business?
Follow along 👀 pic.twitter.com/zu4nvgibiK
— Jackson Greathouse Fall (@jacksonfall) March 15, 2023
Business Guru
First, ChatGPT directed Fall to set up an affiliate marketing site focusing on content about sustainable living and eco-friendly products (because we don't have enough of those already), and even did the leg work of picking out a cheap domain, GreenGadgetGuru.com, for $8.16.
Every business needs a logo, and for that Fall turned to DALL-E, OpenAI's AI image generator, which he asked ChatGPT to generate text prompts for, and which produced a more than serviceable logo.
After providing extensive details on how to design the website and generating its inaugural list article, Fall spent $29 on hosting the domain. The site was now online, leaving him with $62.84 to blow. From there, ChatGPT advised him to spend $40 on targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram.
By the next day, Fall had raised $1,378.84 — or so he claims — in investments from excited Twitter observers, and ultimately pushing the business' value at $25,000 (also unverified).
And this is just the beginning, as Fall intends to ride this experiment as far as it will take him.
Our first piece of content: 10 Must-Have Eco-Friendly Kitchen Gadgets for Sustainable Cooking!
Easy enough. We need products and a cover image. From Midjourney, we got this banger: pic.twitter.com/TN9qKj0swk
— Jackson Greathouse Fall (@jacksonfall) March 15, 2023
Marketing Madness
Is this a modern rags-to-riches story? Well, all we'll say is that it certainly helps to already have a sizeable Twitter following, and for the experiment to blow up on social media.
Presumably, as a brand designer, Fall would already know what he was doing, too. It's not exactly a case of some schmuck being completely directed by an infallible AI. At the very least, he knows what questions to ask.
There's also the question of whether he'll be able to deliver for his investors. As of Tuesday, according to Greathouse Fall, the operation had netted just $109 in revenue — which for a full week of work is a terrible hourly rate.
At the end of the day, it reeks more of a marketing stunt than of a plausible example of how someone could start a business, even if it's just in good fun. Really, it's just Silicon Valley's flavor of AI-infused hustle culture, and unfortunately, it'll inevitably inspire other people to also start businesses by consulting an AI.
Viable or not, we can't help but shudder at the idea of countless, AI-directed and borderline-fake businesses bloating the internet, in the same way AI-generated articles already do.
More on: Researchers Reveal That Paper About Academic Cheating Was Generated Using ChatGPT
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