The Shortcut to AI Mastery
I have been very active with AI for more than a year now. I managed to do things thanks to AI that I would not have dreamt possible. Let me just enumerate some here:
- I rewrote my whole company website
- I created a script for my company with more than 2000 lines of code (I have no development background)
- I created tools for Liotes to make the workflow smoother and faster
- I created soundtracks which is a big surprise because I'm not at all musical
- I created images and movies. I even created an animated Manga film
- I also created an AI advisor for my company that helps me to analyse my website traffic and financial data and helps me define the next steps
AI is not only about the correct prompt
Well, in short, for me AI is a door opener that allows me to do things without needing to learn how to use the basic tools. However, the learning curve was steep. AI is not just about the correct prompt, it's about understanding how AI actually works.
Telling AI that it is a marketing specialist will just make it sound like that
If you tell AI that it should act as a marketing specialist, the AI won't know more about marketing, it will just sound like a specialist. Also this specialist will be for an American market mainly and it could create some issues if you apply his sayings on an European or Asian market.
I have reverse engineered best practices to work with AI
To understand AI, I actually made tons of mistakes and learned one error at a time. Little by little I built my toolbox and refined my way to work with AI. When I started to use Claude Code, I was totally surprised that what I had built through trial and error was actually what professionals were using as best practices... I had reversed engineered best practices for the work with AI. The advantage with my approach is that it's not based on theory and specific technical knowledge. I collected all my experiences and anecdotes and made a book out of it that I have published today.
The book I would have been happy to read a year ago
You guys on hive are the first ones to whom I present this book. I sell it on Gumroad and you are free to pay as much as you want for it. I needed to set a minimal price of 7 $ just to make sure that all the costs are covered and so that I make a small profit for each copy.
If you buy the book, I would be very grateful for a review. Make sure that you tell me if you made a review and you might get a little present ;-).
You can find the book under the following link: https://achim03.gumroad.com/l/yjzui
With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.
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Very cool that you were able to write a book about what you learned Achim.
I hope you sell a lot of them
I honestly don't have too high expectations but I started to write things down and quite quickly realized that this could help other people as well :-)
After a while you sound introduce a discount price in your favorite hive token.
That won’t work with Gumroad, but you’ll get more profit, while helping the price of your favorite token.
It might work on Gumroad if you sold a discount code on Hive. Sorry, I don't have any experience selling on Hive. So not sure of the exact process. But Gumroad has ways to give discounts.
!BBH
I think that myownpage.snapie.io just introduced that for hive but it doesn't come yet with product delivery. I'd have to build the payment plugin first, if I don't want to do things manualy :-)
Ah that’s interesting.
I was indeed thinking about a manual process.
Well, well, you're still into e-books. But do they actually work these days? 😎
I can't really say. I first wanted to create an online course but I look at the e-book as a way to test the market first. I don't expect to sell a lot but before going into something that requires much more work, I want to see if there is an interest at all...
It seems to me that the added value in everything you have created is not quantifiable in terms of quality. It is a qualitative factor that can only be judged by you, satisfied with your work with AI. What makes me think is that you created all this without skills, without study. Knowledge is the basis of know-how. The manga movie you made, for example, could have serious directorial or technical skills errors that a professional would never make. So where does the value in all this lie? In this era of easy access for everyone to produce something (which produces AI, actually), I often ask myself the question: where is the value if there is no previous study in that subject? Does producing with AI without certified previous knowledge have a human value? Owning a house by buying it is equivalent to declaring yourself an expert mason?
It's all about a "shortcut" without knowing the original route?
Perhaps.
But...
... Is worth more than $7 to me.
Thanks a lot for your comment that gave me a lot of food for thoughts.
This is far from the truth. AI doesn't substitute the learning curve but it gives you tools. In the example of manga. I wouldn't claim that my Manga's are perfect, probably far from that. However, I don't know how to draw and thanks to AI, I can circumvent this part. When I make a panel however, it's not AI creating it. I create a background image, a character image, then I overlay them, add blurs, manga symbols, work on the expression of the character and finally try to order all into a coherent story. AI produces the drawings but they are only as good as I prompt them. To assemble things, I actually tried to understand how manga work and what techniques are applied. Then again, I'm a beginner and the quality of my output isn't professional. But the difference is that there is an output at all. Without AI, I would have never been capable of creating an output...
Skills come from applying them as does knowledge. You will only learn a skill if you can use it in a form or another and that's what AI allows me to do.
Value is a relative thing in this respect. For somebody who doesn't care about Manga, what is the value of Manga? For me, this tool allowed me to learn much more and start creating things. I learned a lot about Manga and a whole world opened to me. For me this is a big added value.
I think that you misunderstand what AI is. AI doesn't just give you a perfect result. If you want to create a visual animation, it will look wrong 99% of the time. AI will produce 5 seconds to 15 seconds clips and most of the time you won't be able to use them. If the Manga drawer needed to learn how to draw, the AI manga animator needs to learn how to use the AI so that it gives the best results. This is a long learning curve and I speak from experience.
When Gutenberg invented the printing press, he took away the monopole of copying books from monks that were copying books by hand. Now you could copy a book without the knowledge of the monks. But new knowledge was needed. You needed a whole new set of skills related to the printing press to reach a final result.
I see the use of AI in the same respect. It's a technology that will substitute others but this technology in itself requires a lot of skills and knowledge and that is exactly the reason why I wrote my book. In my opinion AI is not a technology to shortcut the original route. The aim of my book is to learn how to deal with AI at a high level without needing to do all the mistakes that I have done during this year. I don't believe that AI will disappear again. It's a technology that is here to stay and I believe that only very few people really know how to work correctly with AI. The book is a way for people to understand this technology better and to get a head start for when it will be a required skill in most jobs.
'When Gutenberg invented the printing press, he took away the monopole of copying books from monks that were copying books by hand.'
But if you don't know how to write, It doesn't matter what tool you use. AI writes for you, if you want. It is only a probabilistic algorithm, and not a deterministic one. If you let the AI write for you, You won't have really written something. You will only have delegated the task.
In making backgrounds for your manga it doesn't matter how you helped the AI produce the result, if you don't have expertise in making comics or manga, your background can be beautiful but totally useless.
To make a manga you need multiple skills that you only get with experience and study. Making manga is a Japanese cultural process that goes beyond the comprehension of a Western imitation.
At the same time American, Argentine, French, Italian comics... They all have different rules and 'souls' that must be studied and understood.
"Making a manga with the AI" has no meaning, without the culture.
The culture and the skills are the real background in every human form of art.
AI is an algorithm.
It's an interesting way to share your experience. I do agree that AI isn't as intuitive. It takes some work to get the answers the way you want them
What I've realised is that AI doesn't know the truth, it knows the most probable answer and there is a huge difference between the two. It's only when we are aware of that, that we can actually understand why we should tread every answer that AI gives us with some distance and skepticism.
Did you have to pay the subscription fee? Because there are limits for the free version in Claude.
Yes, you are right. The free version is very limited.