Diving into ai – What I’ve learnt and what’s next?

Do you feel like you’re falling behind the Ai game?

Each month it feels like a new leap forward jumps the tech even further ahead of me.

I’ve dabbled quite a bit with Ai image generation to inspire my worldbuilding. But, what I didn’t like was how long it took to prompt engineer something that was usable, and it still wasn’t exactly what I had in my head. 

Here’s are examples of images I’ve generated using Leonardo Ai:

Ai images vs photobashing

I’ve enjoyed my photobashing experiments much more than generating ai images. Perhaps because the end result was the output of my effort and skill, whereas the ai images didn’t feel like they had anything of me in them. Because, in truth, they don’t.

This is The Courier, my first serious attempt at photobashing. It’s not perfect, and in many ways the ai images are better. But I’m far more proud of The Courier than any of the ai generated images.

And to prove it’s not ai generated, here’s a time lapse of me making the image.

Using ChatGPT to write short stories

I’ve also used Chatgpt to write short stories, however I found it produced mediocre stories at best when trying to write longer stories.

What I did find was that it could generate interesting stories around the 50 word mark. Especially if I let ChatGPT generate a longer story and then I edited out a 50 word story.

It’ll make more sense if I show you what I mean. 

This is a short story set in my Synthmark world called 

Ghost signal

“Your Synthmark is offline,” the message blinked on Dante’s forearm. In a world where connectivity was life, he was a ghost. No transactions, no identity. AlphaOmega had wiped him for hacking their systems. So he wandered through the city as an economic zombie.

Until one night, in an underground bar he met others like him. Zombies with a plan. They were creating a new network called “The Real Market”. It would be a loose collection of merchants, citizens and corps who trade in physical currency. Free from the oversight of AlphaOmega’s corporate control.

Dante joined them, rewriting the rules. In the neon-lit darkness, a revolution was born.

As you can see, it generates alright stories – though it feels more like a synopsis than a story and required me to edit the piece.

Using ChatGPT to create building descriptions

My best use so far has been to generate a large number of building descriptions when designing the main cyberpunk city for Synthmark. 

Here’s an example of the building descriptions:

Gutterworks Plastics Plant

• Description: An old plant at the city outskirts where discarded plastics and polymers are melted and reshaped into industrial parts. The whole building smells of melted plastic and oil.
• Unique Feature: “The Melting Floor,” where vats of bubbling polymers glow a deep orange, filling the space with toxic fumes.
• People:
  • Tanis “Sludge” Eko, a plant manager with a weak constitution but strong lungs from years on the floor.
  • Mara Lesko, a line worker with an eye for salvaging rare polymers.
  • Hann “Melter” Fain, a heavyset security chief who oversees “waste management.”

For a quick building description to use when worldbuilding, this gives a great flavour that can be expanded later. Perfect whether you’re an author wanting to write or a GM who quickly needs ideas to help create a setting.

Using AI for art is all well and good. But what’s next?

The 2 Ai areas that could be really powerful for small businesses

The images, short stories and worldbuilding is all fun. But I’m interested in how Ai can help me with my day to day tasks, especially in the small businesses I help.

I’m currently researching 2 areas:

1. Agentic ai specifically when used in workflows
2. The use of ai that only uses a closed data set/company specific knowledge bases

That’s where my curiosity is at the moment because I see them being the most powerful use for AI so far. I’d like to learn how to integrate these into my day to day processes.

I’ve been watching YouTube videos from people showing how they’re creating workflows with Ai agents.

This video from Ahrefs with Gael from Authority Hacker is a good example

The tools I’ll use

I expect I’ll start by using

• Make.com because I’ve used it to build workflows before, such as my content curation tool, so know how the platform works. Now it has AI agents, it’ll make workflows even more powerful.

• Google products – because I have a business plan with Google which unlocks many of the AI features such as NotebookLM. This looks to be a good tool for doing research on a specific data set.

So that’s where I am with AI at the moment. Needing to do more research and experiments to figure it out.