April 14, 2023

Shilpa Ramaswamy

We Took The 30 Minutes AI Challenge. Here’s What we Discovered…

Not long ago, we stumbled upon an intriguing article, “Superhuman: What can AI do in 30 minutes?” by Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick. In this piece, Ethan

Table of contents

Introduction

Not long ago, we stumbled upon an intriguing article, “Superhuman: What can AI do in 30 minutes?” by Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick. In this piece, Ethan asserts that he successfully executed an entire campaign from scratch in less than 30 minutes using AI tools.

This piqued our interest, leading us to leverage AI for our upcoming Hackathon next month. While the outcomes we achieved needed some human refinement, they were nothing short of remarkable. In essence, our experience resonated with the sentiments shared by one of Ethan’s readers.

Though AI tools show immense potential, they also possess the capacity to disrupt. We conducted a parallel experiment to showcase AI’s prowess. In just 30 minutes, AI conducted market research, formulated a positioning document, crafted an email campaign, designed a website code and produced a video. These results were a testament to the remarkable capabilities of AI.

AI as an Email Marketer

We figured it was time to let AI flex its muscles and learn all about our company. So, we took the plunge and asked AI to educate itself on everything Akaike.

How did we do that? Well, we used Bing, a remarkable GPT-4 model connected to the internet. With its research capabilities, Bing dove headfirst into exploring our products and the market they’re part of.

Prompt Used:

“Look up Akaike Technologies. What are the special insights you can find about this company?”

Now that we’ve equipped ChatGPT with the necessary information, it’s time to assign it a specific role. In this case, we AKWS ChatGPT to take on the role of a marketer and create an email marketing campaign and web page outline for Hackaike Technologies’ upcoming hackathon.

Prompt used:

“Pretend you are a marketing genius. We are going to launch a hackathon at Akaike Technologies called Hackaike. You should give me a document that outlines an email marketing campaign and a single webpage to promote it.”

With no human intervention, it then created the outline for seven emails.

We then proceeded to create an email prompt for every outline and within 3 minutes, ChatGPT drafted over seven emails. We are attaching one of the emails for your reference.

AI as a Coder

We set ChatGPT on a mission to build the initial stage of our website.

Prompt Used:

“You are a skilled website designer tasked with crafting the launch announcement page for our Hackaike hackathon event. Create an HTML page that can be easily run on any computer. Additionally, please provide a list of the necessary assets and their corresponding placements on the webpage.”

We decided to enlist the help of another AI, MidJourney, to generate the images we needed for the hero image on the website and on the event poster.

Prompt used:

Create an image of tech professionals working in the AI universe

AI as a Script Writer and Video Creator

We approached Bing with a request to come up with a compelling script for the Hack-aike launch video. Once we had the script in hand, we turned to D-ID, utilizing their realistic voice generation and video creation capabilities to bring our launch video to life.

You can watch it here!

If we had had a few extra minutes, we could have incorporated some of Bing’s suggested images into the talking head video to give it more variety. In addition, we could have achieved better results with the help of video-editing software.

Conclusion

As we wrap up our AI adventure, we’d like to share some key takeaways from the experiment. While we managed to produce a significant amount of content using various AI tools, we discovered that human intervention was still vital, particularly when designing the website, graphics, and videos.

Despite using the same approach as Professor Ethan in developing the campaign, we obtained different results. It’s evident that proficiency with AI tools and clarity while crafting prompts, along with a deep understanding of design and visual elements, significantly impacts the quality of AI-generated content.

Though the emails crafted by Generative AI were noteworthy, they were not quite as refreshing as we had hoped. In fact, we had to come up with different prompts to improve the quality of the email content and this consumed time.

This brings us to an important realization — content creators must invest more time in understanding their target audience’s interests and incorporating their insights into AI-generated content. It’s crucial that humans put in the necessary effort to provide the right prompts to AI so that it can ultimately produce exceptional results.

So, does this approach increase our workload or liberate us from certain tasks? Surprisingly, our 30-minute race against time revealed that human effort remains the driving force, but the direction of these efforts has shifted. As we embrace AI, the dynamic between artificial intelligence and human creativity continues to evolve, and it’s a fascinating journey that’s just beginning. Stay tuned for more AI adventures!

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