Something is wrong. I sense a disturbance in the force, or maybe I haven’t fully digested my spicy kebab. It will remain a mystery.
Nobody knows that I am also on Medium (dan-dan-daaaaan!). I registered for fun many moons ago, wrote couple of thingies and dropped the platform for Substack after I got zero feedback. I never deleted my account, because who does? So, I still receive the friendly Medium Daily Digest email. May the Gods be praised.
FYI, my selected interests are Tech, Culture and Society. Which for Medium roughly translate to AI, Random Art, Self-Help and American politics. The AI stuff is overwhelmingly the majority over the others and usually consist of a bunch of get-rich-quick ideas. Don’t trust my word, trust my Gmail:
The highlighted ones are not solely limited to AI but revolve around it in conjunction with another activity. I have to be honest; at the beginning I was reading them.
I have never forgiven myself for not getting AAPL at $90 or for throwing away my Neolithic crypto wallet. I am old, but maybe these young brilliant minds have it figured out. I will give them a change. Was I impressed? No. Will I share their secrets with you? Gladly.
Apparently, there is a foolproof process that will generate various amounts of money (from $100 to $100K) in a few simple steps:
Step 1 — Pick a niche. You don’t know what a niche is? It’s fine, jump to step 2.
Step 2 — Ask ChatGPT to help you identify opportunities to make easy, effortless, passive income without sweat. Writing a good prompt is important, try something like: “easy moneymaking idea? ELI5” He will know. *wink wink*
Step 3 — Pick the idea you like the most and ask him to elaborate. Try “step-by-step success plan ELI10” for starters. If you have a specific skill you can leverage: “[my skill] + step by step success plan ELI10”.
Step 4 — Do what ChatGPT says.
Step 5 — Sit back, enjoy your earnings.
It’s a joke, because it is. The only things I can second is step 1. To be successful, finding your niche is important. That being said, it’s not what most people think of. In all those articles we are trying to find an unexploited niche to exploit it. In reality, people have skills and interests which in turn make them suitable to be employed in a specific niche.
You will find your niche, after you find your true self — Jesus (alleged)
The truth is you shouldn’t jump into something you don’t understand. Do you want to trade stocks? Then research and study stocks. Asking an LLM, a glorified tokenization system, for financial predictions is not a smart idea. You can make money; you can lose money. Luck will give you the same results. Real life gambling is NOT a strategy.
At the casino, you can gamble because the game has strict rules, you can calculate the odds and do your best to beat them. With stocks, especially the highly speculative ones, market price is volatile and rarely correlates to real life events. A company could do great, and stock go down for indirectly related reasons and vice versa. BE CAREFUL!
Another recurring example given is selling a simple algorithm to a small company to automate their workflow (usually PowerApps-related). This may work if (1) you have contacts (= you have a reputation) and (2) you know how to sell. There are plenty of companies that survive with outdated practices. You won’t convince them to embrace “the future”, let alone your future. In small companies, there is at least one nerd who can do what you’re selling. Real money is made consulting for big companies. There, this fluff is gold. Tell them all their practices are wrong, blind them with charts and data, sell them your solution. The executives will love it. No cap.
Last example is the worst: make AI generated content. My favorite “I Can’t Write. So I Used ChatGPT to Create a $9.99 eBook That Sells Daily”. It’s so bad that multiple people have posted it and one of them is currently suspended. Is it legit? I mean, nobody is stopping you to publish whatever you want. If you put it on Amazon, and it’s garbage, people will write a bad review. Pro tip: sell it directly through your site (or social media presence).
Seriously speaking, you see for yourself how many people write on Substack about how they got big on Substack. All the online gurus who know “the secret” will happily sell it to you. There is always a catch. You either make a product, or you pretend you know how to make a product and sell that. The latter is easier to do, especially with AI, and might give you the same (if not more) return if you are good at bullshitting people online.
Is everybody on Medium full of shit? Of course not, but they are pitching you a fantasy. Remember, AI or not, the grift never dies!