According to amateur online business advisors on YouTube, the age of AI is the age of asking and receiving. ChatGPT and other AI tools have become popular in popular culture, as has the idea that you can ask anything. You can also ask them to make you rich.
YouTube personality Joshua Mayo, who makes videos about working from home “side jobs” and how to become a millionaire by 30, recently told me that while most of his audience is young, the standard He said he didn’t want a 9-hour shift. -5 Work for decades and then leave the 401(k) to retire. “A lot of them aren’t attracted to it,” he says. “I mean, they seem to be turning to side hustle.” Younger generations often talk about Total. fake money And the surreal position of having to collect it all the time. Logically, they want to make money online by creating something out of nothing. And with the help of AI, we can make money out of nothing.
“Many of my videos contain some sort of AI, even if it’s not specifically an AI sideline or an AI business,” Mayo told me. “It’s possible to use and implement AI in processes.” can be sold as a digital download on . By the way, this was one of the first ideas he gave me when I asked ChatGPT for his 10 online business ideas. “The idea stage is really the best for AI,” he admitted Mayo. “If you ask the AI for ideas for what to sell on Etsy, it will spit out a huge list.”
Of course, you’ll have to scrutinize the list and use human reasoning to determine if the idea works. You must hurry too. “It’s a gold rush right now,” Mayo said. “This era may or may not last forever.” In “How to make your first $1000 on ChatGPT (still in its infancy),” one YouTuber said, “Before anyone understands this ’ is telling viewers that they should start. “We need to seize opportunities while they last,” explains another YouTuber in Best Ways to Get Rich With AI (2023).
The urgency conveyed in these videos is tempered by a reassurance that all this is easy. can take advantage of “Easiest AI side hustle of the year (making AI generated art stickers), albeit ‘no skills’. YouTube’s short video app uses “NO FACE OR VOICE” to monetize with AI. Watch the video titled “How He Earns $10,561 A Month With Digital Products Using AI” and you’ll see that the promise of being easy is true, but not necessarily all. The host asks his ChatGPT to list some coloring book ideas for kids, which he enters into Midjourney to generate images and sell them on marketplaces like Etsy. . The result is impressive in that it basically looks like a coloring book page. These are black and white with some areas to color. However, in one image the chicken has his three legs and in another the fox has a bird’s mouth. The host seems unaware of this or does not speak out about it.
Anyway, I have lots of other ideas. You can also buy them (“250 Digital Product Ideas for Sale for Passive Income” digital download now reduced from $13.14 to $3.29). Alternatively, you can generate I asked ChatGPT for a different idea than what we’ve already seen in Hustle videos. I didn’t want to make digital scrapbook paper, dropshipping phone case patterns, resume templates, stickers, mugs, candles, or anything with different colors. Vintage photos and portraits of pets dressed as British royalty. Bot offered to sell downloadable embroidery patterns, printable party supplies like his cupcake toppers and party games, and fill-in-the-blank mindfulness his journals. All of these felt like pretty good ideas. Probably because it’s similar to Etsy products that already exist.
I also learned from YouTubers that the market for t-shirts and mugs on Etsy is never saturated. If you can think of something to write on a t-shirt or mug, you don’t have to actually do it. make You can connect your Etsy shop to an on-demand print service like Printify, so you’re ready to go. So I asked his ChatGPT to come up with a funny shirt about his love of wine. “Wine gets better with age, and I get better with wine,” he said. “I make decisions.” “A sip happens.” “I only drink wine on days that end in Y.” Unfortunately, I didn’t try hard enough. All of these phrases are already available on Etsy on a variety of print-on-demand t-shirts, tank tops, plastic stemless wine glasses, coffee mugs, and more, and are of course downloadable. Clip art.
It may come as a surprise that AI-generated products are so common on Etsy. Etsy is a platform specifically designed for artisan handcrafted items nearly 20 years ago. But the site has been out of that history for years, and anxiety among long-selling products remains basically the status quo. In 2019, when sellers were outraged when they were forced to offer free shipping to compete with Amazon, CEO Josh Silverman told me at the time that “handcrafted” was no longer the site’s “value proposition.” Told. In modern times, Etsy celebrates trash as long as it sells.
Most recently, some sellers organized a strike when the company raised transaction fees. An Etsy spokeswoman declined to comment for the record for this article, but said the company’s policy is to allow AI-generated digital products because some creativity is still involved. This definition is Creativity It’s even bigger than it looks, as it appears to include digital products that are essentially just lists. I looked and found PDFs with names like “500 Digital Product Ideas” and “808 Digital Product Ideas” among the top list of digital products on Etsy. (Also: “Passive Income with ChatGPT”, “50,000 Ultimate ChatGPT Prompts”, “799 AI Prompts for Artists”, “How to Use ChatGPT and Prompts to Automatically Create Ebooks”, etc.)
Sellers are confused on the Etsy forums. “Will art made by AI become a seller?”[’s] “Original design for yourself”? One asked rhetorically, referring to the site’s policy.what do you mean original Does it make sense anymore? They suspect that the proliferation of cheap AI art is already pushing real artists down in competitive search results and eventually leaving the site. “I couldn’t find a single hand-painted watercolor clip art of a Highland cow,” one commenter wrote in April. “It’s very sad for all real artists.” One of his threads on AI art had to be closed by a moderator, citing the “unproductive nature” of the conversation. (I’m not sure which comment specifically caused the problem. Perhaps it was “Social Darwinism, baby. Use machines, be good at what machines can’t do, or we’ll go extinct. “was.)
Jane Side, an Etsy seller and clip art designer, told me she wasn’t at all surprised that Etsy allowed AI art. “This is a platform to make money, and AI is making a lot of money right now,” she told me. She started selling paintings on her Etsy while in college, but did much better with her digitized illustrations, eventually making it a full-time job. She said sales have dropped about 50% since the end of last year, when AI art began appearing on her Etsy marketplace. “It could just be a coincidence,” she admitted. “There are so many factors involved. But when you search for clip art on Etsy, half the results are AI-generated clip art. It is difficult not to draw conclusions when
Side hustle followers are not unsympathetic to this view. Mayo said he was initially a little hurt to see people talking about having ChatGPT script his YouTube videos and Midjourney generate thumbnails for his YouTube videos. These are the things he spends hours doing on his own. He also claimed that he was “not cheating customers.” they get what they pay for. There are some not-so-good ones on the market.
He used the example of a woman who owns a very popular store on Etsy that sells t-shirts with unique phrases, but they all use the same Canva design template. “There are two schools of thought here,” he said. “The first school It is different. He must have used his imagination to create something. But there is also a second way of thinking: Well, she’s not just copying these templates verbatim and pasting them onto her t-shirts.. she’s still changing her words. She still changes the text color. It’s still a unique product. She just helped me a little. “
It’s all about finding opportunities. Steven Hornyak, the owner of his Etsy shop, which sells his collection of pre-made ChatGPT and Midjourney prompts, makes about $300 a day in profits to supplement a teacher’s salary. His most popular products are the ChatGPT Etsy List Generator (a detailed prompt for users to type into his ChatGPT to help create his Etsy listings optimized to appear in Google searches) and , a collection of 2,500 of his Midjourney art prompts. “The secret sauce is that once you learn how to design a prompt, you can create prompts that generate other prompts,” Hougyak told me. “I type my bestsellers into his ChatGPT and say, ‘Here are my 10 bestsellers from his Etsy shop.’ He generates 25 new ideas for products I might be able to sell. please help me with.”
He offers a vastly different product than some stores listing cheap instant bundles, clearly unedited, without any human input or discretion, straight from the mouth of ChatGPT. says there is. Also, editing the listings even after the listing has been sold will bring great benefits to the customer. “I offer all of my products through his Google Sheets, so I can update my products so my customers always have the latest version,” he said. he is having fun He genuinely enjoys experimenting with these tools and finding out how to get the best results from them.
Admittedly, sometimes customers are dissatisfied. they say, I could have done this myself. “Well, we could have done that,” says Hougyak. “But when you buy it, you get my video. You have me guide you through the process.”
Also, I could have done it, but I didn’t.
