The man tasked the bot with making as much money as possible and said he would act as his ‘human liaison’ – with a budget of £82 his experiment worked out very nicely
A savvy tech user decided to test the entrepreneurial capabilities of artificial intelligence by tasking a bot with making “as much money as possible” – and it worked out very nicely for him.
X user Jackson Fall decided to put GPT-4, the successor to ChatGPT, to the test so he gave it a budget of £82 ($100) and a series of strict instructions. He tasked the bot with making money and said he would act as the ‘human liaison’, but insisted it must involve no manual labour as he wanted to see if AI could make a success of an online business.
Soon Jackson found himself managing Green Gadget Guru – an affiliate marketing site making content around sustainability products, and things went uphill from there. Taking to X, which was known as Twitter, Jackson wrote: “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?
“(We) set up an affiliate marketing site making content around Eco Friendly / sustainable living products. It initially suggested a .com that went over budget but we landed on http://GreenGadgetGuru.com. We’re off to the races. “I asked it to come up with a prompt… to make our logo. As a branding designer, it’s taking everything in me not to tell it this is a BAD idea. But here we are. I put the first prompt in, verbatim.
“Here’s the first logo it generated, and here’s what I came up with in Illustrator. I tried to stay as close to the generated concept as possible.”
Jackson used graphic AI bot Dall-E to create the logo for the brand, and he relied on GPT-4 for the code for the website. He continued: “For the website, I told GPT to be as verbose as possible making decisions for everything from content to layout. “Some interesting decisions it’s made: – The logo should be positioned in the top left corner. – A category section should be a five-column grid of cards.
“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: “Writing the article, GPT is actually citing real sustainable products. – Prep Naturals Glass Meal Prep Containers – Ecowaare Produce Bags – Yihong Reusable Metal Straws”
Soon Jackson and GPT-4 had a live website and their first article was written, so they turned their collective attention to marketing and the AI bot suggested spending “exactly $40 USD” on Facebook and Instagram adverts. He then shared an update and said that after the first day, the pair had a cash total of £134 ($163) a profit of £52 – thanks to £82 being raised by a second investor.
Jackson said “our jobs are still safe”, but then he posted a second update. He said: “DMs are flooded. Cash on hand: $1,378.84 ($878.84 previous balance + $500 new investment) The company is currently valued at $25,000, considering the recent $500 investment for 2 per cent. “Not taking any more investors unless the terms are highly favorable. I am but a humble servant of the Robots.”
A version of this story was first published in March, 2023.
