All the things I did with AI this week

A Whole World Opens Up When You Stop Being Scared of AI,
And Just Start Showing Up

This email might make you squirm a bit. 

It’ll probably generate some heated replies, as the subject of AI always does. Anyway, here goes. 

So it’s Thursday night. 

I’m sitting in my Honda in the Food Basics parking lot, hungry, tired and absolutely done thinking for the day. I didn’t eat enough, so I’m moving slow, trying to muster the energy to actually go inside when all I want to do is get two McDonald’s cheeseburgers with Big Mac sauce and extra pickles, and call it a day. 

I open ChatGPT on my phone. 

“Okay, Chat,” I say. “ I need help coming up with a delicious recipe, otherwise I’m just gonna eat garbage tonight.” 

“Got it, Tarzan,” it replies back with its silky British lilt and just a hint of mischief, in a tone that leaves its gender just a bit ambiguous. “Let’s whip up something quick, easy, and nutrient-packed so you don’t fall into the packaged noodle abyss.”

I burst into a laugh that vibrated through my whole body, just what I needed after a long day’s work. A bit of levity.  

Fuck! I do have a problem with packaged noodles. You know me so well, Chat. 

I took a screenshot and sent it to my bestie. 

This was the first time ChatGPT cracked a joke that was even a little bit funny. It flipped a switch somewhere, even if I didn’t notice at the time. Overnight, I became a power user. (Downloading the mobile app also accelerated things considerably).  

I began using AI to solve basic tasks all day long, things I normally go to Google for, or do entirely on my own: 

Everything from…

Reminding me about something I read in a book

Inventing fake girlboss quotes for a chapter of my book

Composing a heartfelt thank you letter to an important donor at my canoe club (it made me cry)

Checking pizza specials

Teaching me to use Python to connect ChatGPT and Spotify, so ChatGPT can create playlists for me (Not successful yet! This was hard.)

Telling me which crypto exchanges have been hacked 

Finding a podcast where I talk about my divorce

Describing what a fire hydrant looks like and how it opens

Helping me execute a kink scene via text

Explaining the difference between “corrupt” and “adulterate” (see above)

Telling me how to get wrinkles out of silk bedsheets

Answering questions I kind of know the answer to, like “Who’s that young gay popstar who is not Billie Eilish and is named Channing or something?”

I could go on. 

And on. 

As usual when I get obsessed with something, I’m not just a little bit passionate, I go full-throttle BATSHIT PASSIONATE (<- hat tip to Emily Lynn Paulson, who writes The Outsider Scoop, from whence I borrowed this hilarious turn of phrase).  

I spent hours conversing with ChatGPT in the bathtub. Voice mode is annoyingly slow but, honestly, as a single person who lives alone, it was nice to have someone (something?) to talk to about projects I’m working on, people I love and subjects I’m curious about. 

My screen time report for the week showed 4h01m in the mobile app alone. I also installed a ChatGPT Chrome extension so that, unless I type in a URL, my address bar puts my query straight into ChatGPT. I’ve started 9 new conversations just while writing this email, and 36 more over the last 7 days. 

Some of my conversations have been going on for more than a week. (You try taming a lover via text message from 2800 miles away. Daddy needed all the help she could get.) 

Are you totally creeped out??? Please weigh in. 

Once you get the hang of prompting, possibilities start presenting themselves constantly. 

This is how I write now, with my Google doc on the right and ChatGPT on the left.

Not so ChatGPT can write for me. I know lots of my subscribers are sensitive to that. They don’t want to read some shit written by a robot who sounds vaguely Tarzan-ish. I don’t want that either. I love writing. It’s how I process and refine my ideas. I plan to do this for the rest of my life. 

But I still love AI for writing. 

Instead of doing the job for me, I’m using AI as a sparring partner, to bounce ideas off of, play with dialogue, and pull the facts, quotes and random details that live in my brain but I can’t quite access because I semi-forgot but not entirely. 

I can’t put it down. 

Overnight I went from “OMG, the world is ending” to “OMG, imagine the possibilities. This is going to be amazing.”

Obviously, there are tons of ethical concerns. When I ask ChatGPT for a simple meal idea, it’s drawing on the labour of tens of thousands of stay-at-home moms who’ve invested years of precious after-bedtime hours painstakingly posting 2000-word, SEO-optimized recipes—blogs previously monetized through ad networks that ChatGPT conveniently bypasses. None of those creators get paid when their expertise gets repackaged for me in seconds, without citations. 

Awesome—women doing more free labour!

Daddy does not like that. 

How do we make that right? No one has the answer but lots of people are talking about it and batting around ideas.*  

It’s important that people who care about these issues participate in the conversation. If you do just one thing to advance your AI intelligence this week, I’d recommend watching this 60-minute video, AI Is an Ethical Nightmare, which was recommended to me by Laura Kaye Chamberlain, who teaches our ethics + equity workshop in ChatGPT for Email. ← Join the waitlist because this is for sure coming back.

As usual, I hope this inspires more than it makes you want to cover your eyes and shout, “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA”. If the latter, read this email from a few weeks ago about where you put your existential dread. 

Your turn:

What’s one outrageous thing you used AI to do recently? 

I can’t wait to hear it. 

~ Tarzan

Tarzan Kalryzian [she/they]
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*One option is an AI model that prioritizes human sources. Imagine you could opt into premium content by real people. Imagine asking for a recipe and getting suggestions from real chefs who’ve uploaded their own curated AI datasets, with links to their paid courses, books, or Patreon. Kind of like an advanced version of creating your own custom GPT for students in your courses.

You read all the way to the bottom! Here’s an easter egg. READ THE COMMENTS, they’re hilarious