What About Loving An Artist?

I know from several sources that I am not the easiest person to live with or date. That’s okay. I’ll be difficult. I depend on getting my alone time, my creative time, and I cannot be boxed in by a job, a relationship, or money woes. Those are my happiness killers. If I can maintain my creative balance, keep my energy fueled, aim for the 6s and 7s, I can be more productive than most. I feel best when I’m building multiple architectures and involved in a number of dreams at any given time.

Today, and all of this week, I’ve been waking up rather early. I am talking about 3 am, not my normal 6 am. What can I do with an additional 3 hours of “me” time? Yes, this could be a creative strategy, but it burns me out in the end, and leads to over-dependence on coffee and adrenaline. I can do it for a bit, in the name of capturing the moment, the dream, but it’s not a lifestyle I can maintain.

As I approach the rest of the summer as a solo-pilot, I am dipping into my ecstasy with creative flights of fancy. This is how I get things done. Insomnia is not a problem if it provides the quiet night to approach the unapproachable. Mania might be a gift. Do you think most musicians, artists, and writers are bi-polar? That might be a stereotype for a reason. I will readily admit to being neurotypical. I push toward the edge of the comfortable and try and record the experience.

In much of my current work I am digging up old memories. I am not really a novelist as much as a “recordist.” Sure, I’m purposefully adapting reality to tell the story I want to tell. But that’s what artists do.

Here’s what I want to get across, as I leave behind a very loving woman, I have to have alone time. I am responsible for asking for what I need. The “butthurt” response will not be taken lightly. I cannot have my partner being passive aggressive and disappointed in the lack of attention and entertainment I am providing us. I’ll be alone, thanks.

I know how to be happy alone. I know how to use, manage, and mine my time. I don’t always get it right, but I give it my best shot. At this very moment, a day I declared “music all day” I am watching a 2003 Radiohead live show. Thom Yorke has captured my imagination for a long time. I traded a time-and-a-half shift for a day off.

I’ve done exactly what I wanted. Awoke at 2 am. Even early on the early scale. My creative juice in the morning was fruitful. Now, I’m relaxing and recharging. While I am an extrovert, I need quiet downtime to restore my energy. What about you?

John McElhenney — executive coaching
Facebook & LinkedIn & McElhenney.net

A few of my creative ai motions:

• the happy cashier podcast < exploring the “retail life”
• hyper-soul podcast < a sci-fi exploration as podcast with NotebookLM
• hyper-soul < the science fiction exploration and world-building project
• hyper*soul GFX < the graphic novel
• waltwhitman.ai < a book of “whitmanesque poetry” with zero AI
• Radio No Head < *ai* parsed music for you to sing and dream with
• clickthis.ai < my team for *ai* marketing and sales acceleration
• artistsway.ai < exploring and teaching the creative collaboration between AI and humans

The Question: Is AI going to take my job?

Let’s explore Google’s NotebookLM and the interesting way we are leveraging this AI platform for streamlined content creation. Let’s get one part straight: AI is not creative. And add one important detail: fear or avoidance of AI *is* going to hurt you.

I’ve written a previous article on using NotebookLM for podcasting. (My First 100 NotebookLM Podcasts) Today, I’m going to share some of my recent creative motion: The Happy Cashier.

I started with a simple idea. Create The Happy Cashier about my experience at returning to hte grocery store life. As I began writing, I used AI for a number of additional content.

The first thing I needed was an avatar of “The Happy Cashier.”

Then, each day as I created new posts about my experience and trying to rebalance and regain my own mindfulness in the chaos of a retail job, I created more avatars with AI.

Next, by post #5 I had AI write a song for The Happy Cashier. “This Checkout Life was written and performed by AI, with little more than a prompt from me.

Here are the lyrics This Checkout Life and here is This Checkout Life on YouTube

I was getting in a groove here. So I decided to introduce the podcast. This time, different from my previous experiences, the entire podcast would be generated by NotebookLM from Google.

The Happy Cashier Podcast

More avatars for each post and AI-generated episode and my creative wheels were engaged and accelerating. This is an example of how AI can enable a human’s creative idea, provide feedback and ideas. Then, harnessing AI, the same human (writer, artist, musician, poet) can expand his reach and content variety exponentially.

Okay, but will anyone listen to an AI pretending to be a man and a woman discussing any given topic? Let’s check out the stats so far.

As of this morning there are 46 podcasts featuring the Happy Cashier. Here is the impact of these posts on my channel.

Okay, so 2,800 views is pretty good for content that added about 10 minutes of development time, after I had written the post. That’s 10 minutes, including the Avatar creating, the podcast recording, the and the YouTube video creation.

Here are my stats and frequency of updates for June 2025.

And now, the big reveal…

Will Anyone Return/Subscribe to an AI-generated Podcast?

Here’s the takeaway.

AI podcasting is going to flood the channels with content. The “attention economy” is going to get more crowded and competitive. With the easy and inexpensive creation of AI Voice Clones the opportunities are endless. And, I might say, somewhat terrifying if you’re a content creator. But here’s the human side of this.

I am one person, with a full-time 40-hour-a-week job. I have created 46 podcasts in less than two months, and generated 2,800 listens.

AI did the podcast. AI created my avatars.

How is your amazing HUMAN MIND going to use ai in new and creative ways.

*this prompt: generate a fresh set of happy cashier images in diverse styles (sticker, sumi-e, digital illustration, trading card, emoji icon) and create a new visual montage from scratch to represent the range of his visuals for your brand concept decks. Did not generate anything of interest. So I did it myself with PowerPoint.

Feedback and comments are welcomed.

• Read My First 100 NotebookLM Podcasts
• Start at the beginning: The Happy Cashier Podcast
• PrePodcast: Read The Happy Cashier
• The AI Talking About This Article: Cloud Pilots Podcast

John McElhenney — executive coaching
Facebook & LinkedIn & McElhenney.net

A few of my creative ai motions:

• the happy cashier podcast < exploring the “retail life”
• hyper-soul podcast < a sci-fi exploration as podcast with NotebookLM
• hyper-soul < the science fiction exploration and world-building project
• hyper*soul GFX < the graphic novel
• waltwhitman.ai < a book of “whitmanesque poetry” with zero AI
• Radio No Head < *ai* parsed music for you to sing and dream with
• clickthis.ai < my team for *ai* marketing and sales acceleration
• artistsway.ai < exploring and teaching the creative collaboration between AI and humans

Mind mapping has never been easier. Today, I’m going to go into a different type of mind mapping. With AI prompts and responses, then your own human responses, you can begin to feel out the edges of your own hopes and dreams.

One of the issues with AI that does not exist with your the large human language model of your mind is CURIOSITY. When I set my mind on a new task or dream, there are subroutines working in the background 24-7. AI has a limited amount of attention and it’s off to the next task. Deep research is a way that OpenAI has begun to give ChatGPT some more curiosity. Well, in fact, it’s just giving your question or quest more cycles of data mining.

The coolest part of your human mind is the data mining that is happening all the time. In the past we wondered what all the extra grey matter in the human brain was intended for. Today, we have discovered is sort of the swap-file for all of your hopes and dreams. You mind, your human brain, is constantly adjusting, recalculating, and refactoring itself.

When I sleep I know my mind will be dreaming and REMing and relaxing. I can prime my dreams by reading from an inspiring book or working one of my creative projects. As the energy of waking consciousness fades my beautiful mind will continue to wrestle with the concerns of the day all through the night.

If I feed my mind Tiks and Toks, reality tv drivel, and other flotsum and jetsum, the liminal ideas will be useless. BUT… If I begin cultivating mindfulness, curiosity, and creative ideas, my nights will have more structure and purpose in the “mental recalibration of sleep.”

What Do You Dream About?

The dreams are up to you, to some extent. I know when I’m working on a novel, for example, many of my waking hours are crafting ideas, testing plot variations, multiverses of possibilities for my characters. Drifting into la la land the energy I’ve spent crafting my ideas begins to discharge. That takes the form of dreams and REM releases.

It is not uncommon for me during a productive period to awaken at 3 or 4 in the morning, bursting with energy to capture the next chapter, or in the case of this morning, this idea of mapping my own mind with AI.

How AI Can Reflect Your Dreams?

When you begin to include AI in your creative process an amazing thing begins to happen. Your human mind can focus on what it’s really good at: imaginative leaps, boundless ideas, unstructured enthusiasms. By learning to prompt AI for your own purposes, you are also training your own mind. You are harnessing the beautiful creativity of your life experience and asking AI to give you feedback, to dart down rabbit holes of your ideas and return results often unexpected and occasionally brilliant. But it’s not the AI that is brilliant. It’s the rest of the process.

Ask AI a question and you get an answer. When it’s not the answer you were looking for, ask again, or vary your question. AI never tires of exploring your thoughts. AI never gets frustrated at trying again to generate the image you envision. You mind begins to adapt and become more fluid at including AI into the conversations and explorations.

Let me give you an example from my current creative motions.

I’ve been world-building on a science fiction story for a few years. I’ve used Miro to draw visual maps of my universe as I expand it in my mind and then on paper. Even before the stories are told, I am building and exploring a framework for the universe I call “hyper*soul.”

With AI, I have been exploring my own writing using a Google AI tool called NotebookLM. The AI simulates a podcast type conversation between a man and a woman. They discuss your ideas. They bring in outside resources of their own, to reference and frame your story or article. For this example, I’ve pointed the AIs at my hyper-soul novel.

Then, with AI I begin cutting my story into smaller bits and creating a Graphic Novel. Now, who is driving? Who is the creator? And where is the creativity being generated? Is AI adding to my creativity? Or is AI riffing on my ideas and pattern matching and summarizing my ideas?

It’s a bit of both.

What AI is not doing:

• not generating the narrative of the main characters
• not determining the arc of the interwoven storylines
• not introducing quantum-leap creative angles for the storyline

AI is taking my idea, my words, and crafting a graphic simulation. It appears that AI is “creating” some fantastic images, but it’s merely reswizzling the ideas and images that it finds in it’s own limited database of imagery and words.

While the discussions from NotebookLM appear to generate original ideas, it’s an illusion. AI can’t grasp what my story is about. Can’t understand the motivation of my main character. Can’t dive into the motivations and hopes of the antagonist. It simply reflects back a mosaic of colors and shapes, or words (depending on the output I’m requesting) into something that resembles creativity.

Finding Your Own Human Edge

AI has started to augment my own creative adventures. Now, with *memory* ChatGPT can go back and rejoin the previous conversations. The AI can use the lens of a new story or article to frame up synthesized concepts *around* the topic that I am designating.

Here’s a fuller example of what I’m talking about. I’m going to give THIS article to NotebookLM and you will see how my two podcast ghosts will magically appear intelligent and human while they discuss this article, in the context of the other articles they’ve digested. I’ve been feeding NotebookLM on several different projects for months. It’s like the tenacity is from me. The retention of ideas is AI. The request is driven by my curiosity and my own creative drive that wants to continue to build the conversation between myself, my human mind, and the AI of NotebookLM that my human brain as assembled over months of work. Creative work is mine. The summary and synthesis is AI.

By bouncing ideas off AI I get more ideas. I add or subtract those ideas, those wormholes, from the process, and we continue. I can feel my own capacity expanding into Graphic Novel Author. Do I need to give OpenAI or Claude credit for our collaboration? Is it a collaboration? Is it something else?

How are you expanding your understanding of your own mind by interacting and prompting AI? The changes in your mind are significant. Not unlike the recent research that showed people that us AI too much, for summarizing rather than thinking themselves, begins to dumb down the human’s mind. The canvas that should be lit up with energy and enthusiasm is bland and empty.

Let’s light up AI and our human mind together. I’m close to releasing ARTISTSWAY.AI. Where I will be providing better explanations of these ideas, and the process of expanding your own processing and generating power through the use of today’s AI platforms.

The dawn of AI + CR8V Human is here.

Feedback and comments are welcomed.

John McElhenney — executive coaching
Facebook & LinkedIn & McElhenney.net

A few of my creative ai motions:

• hyper-soul podcast < a sci-fi exploration as podcast with NotebookLM
• hyper-soul < the science fiction exploration and world-building project
• hyper*soul GFX < the graphic novel
• waltwhitman.ai < a book of “whitmanesque poetry” with zero AI
• Radio No Head < *ai* parsed music for you to sing and dream with
• clickthis.ai < my team for *ai* marketing and sales acceleration
• artistsway.ai < exploring and teaching the creative collaboration between AI and humans

• facebook – 128 visitors
• linkedin – 12 visitors
• twitter – 4 visitors

While this isn’t one of my high-performing sites, the content is important to me. So, how do I go about building momentum in the world of social media where LinkedIn is now a JOBSITE and TWITTER is suppressing anyone who doesn’t pay for their checkmark. And old FACEBOOK with the ever shrinking algo. It’s hard to find your tribe online these days.

They are probably scrolling Tiks and Toks, binging Netflix, or doing something else online besides seeking out content. Your audience is not seeking your story. They are seeking everything but your story. How do you break in? Break into their field of vision and offer something so enticing they have to click?

The Organic Options Are Decreasing

It’s hard today to grow a following online. YouTube appears to have the best platform for picking up and feeding subscribers, but ONLY if you’re going to create a lot of content. Last summer, I ran my subscriber numbers up over 20,000 while publishing my first audiobook. When I completed the audiobook posts to the “podcast” a loose term these days, I had about six months where I may have created 5 posts. My subscriber numbers fell below 18,000. Why?

I have to thoughts about why subscribers would UNFOLLOW your YouTube channel.

1. They got bored and didn’t see the value in being a subscriber.
2. They followed/subscribed to you primarily to get you to “follow back.”

It’s a common growth strategy: follow as many people as you can and hope for them to reciprocate. When I did not follow back, over 2,000 people unsubscribed. I didn’t start publishing bad content or negative content. They simply subscribed to gain me as a subscriber. When I didn’t subscribe to them, they unsubscribed from my podcast. Odd, right.

Think about how you use YouTube for content. Most of us don’t ever go back and review our subscriptions. We simply carry on. When we notice a content provider we like in our list of available videos to watch, we click on ones we are drawn to. I’ve never gone into my YouTube account looking to find people to unfollow. I don’t know this, but I suspect there’s a limit to how many channels you can subscribe to in a 24-hour or 1-week period. (There is a daily limit on Twitter.)

If you are trying to build your channel with games, you might follow to the limit everyday, then unfollow the ungrateful a few weeks later to free up more slots to follow more channels.

We’re all driving to gain attention. I primarily use Facebook (with groups) and LinkedIn, and Twitter. I occasionally post to Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok. And you can see, even though I have 20,000 followers on Twitter, if I don’t pay Mr. Musk for the privilege, I’m not getting much reach. Probably 0.1% organic reach. I’m not paying for Twitter.

Organically, What Can I Do?

More Facebook posts. Grow my Facebook groups memberships. Keep blasting to Twitter and LinkedIn. And give some attention to TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest as alternatives. I am also on Bluesky, and Mastodon, but I’m not seeing much user volume on those.

Good content will ultimately find an audience. Good marketing and promotions can grow your following, but you can’t continue to pay for traffic, especially if you’re podcast or website are not flooded with advertisements. There’s paying for Google Search, but that’s more expensive than promotions on YouTube.

Keep going. But pay attention to the changing landscape of your followers/subscribers/readers/audience. Build a multi-channel publishing platform.

Online posts, advertising, groups, content honeypots

Books

Podcasts

Videos

Social Media Sites (facebook, linkedin, twitter, instagram, tiktok)

From that perspective you’ve got to keep your hope and optimism high because the organic growth is going to be slow. If you can pay for reach your best options are YouTube promotions and a rare “boost” on Facebook of a post that trends organically first.

Find what moves your audience. Find new audiences by building various content streams. Keep evaluating what’s working, and know what is driving your incoming NEW VISITOR traffic. Be aware of your RETURNING VISITOR traffic as well and make sure you are taking care of both types of visitors to your sites.

• AI is reducing headcounts at all major tech companies
• Big AI players are poaching human talent for 7-figure salaries
• AI can create virtual video games on the fly (without huge staff or budgets)
• Artists utilizing AI are gaining an edge as well as a fundamental understanding of WHAT AI IS and WHAT AI IS NOT.
• New AI companies are sprouting up and crowding our attention spans
• AI companies are also beginning to fail

The biggest tech companies will swallow more AI companies to achieve dominance. It’s happening. It’s going to get fierce in the coming years.

What’s The Frequency Kenneth?

Today I read about an AI platform that’s about to release a game creation engine that will change the business of online and platform gaming. Incidentally, this is just what I’ve been hoping for. I created a business plan for an MMU game a number of years ago. Today, my startup costs are going to be me and the cartoonist that owns the images. Not to mention, my own sci-fi graphic novel, that’s set perfectly to become a dystopian game world. [Hey @ Cory Doctorow, can we collab on a gameworld for Little Brother?]

As headcount reductions become the order of the corporate mandate, a lot of talent in all creative fields are now available for work. Those with AI skills will be recruited. Those with AI fear will be sidelined. Best get used to the new world order. As desktop publishing and then Photoshop changed everything, AI is reconfiguring creative, marketing, writing, and coding work faster than the media can report on it. I’ve been a part of that revolution with ClickThis.ai, an ai-enablement strategy for using today’s available AI systems to accelerate the sales and marketing funnel.

Don’t get confused or overwhelmed by all the AI competition. Faster, more millions or parameters/tokens/credits are not fundamentally changing the AI capabilities today, it’s just making stuff faster. The real breakthrough hasn’t happened yet. AND, in my opinion, it may never happen. The “spark” of AGI requires some quantum (idea not power) leap that hasn’t happened. It’s not even being articulated by the big tech machine that’s driving the hype and frenzy.

AGI according to Microsoft and others is AI generating a billion dollars in revenue. Yes, I understand this focus, but it’s misguided. The benchmark has been set for business and revenue to try and justify the blinding budgets being poured into Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok. There are advances being made, but they’re not in reasoning leaps, they are more fundamental.

When OpenAI released the ChatGPT marketplace, it signaled the future of AI for the small creative and technical artists. Make them yourself. All the artists digging into generative illustration are learning more about AI than their coding counterparts. Though, coding is another area where AI is going to outstrip the sheer power of human coders.

The advances have been more functional.

• How to organize your data to use AI to your own advantage.
• How to secure your private data from the AI crawlers and scrapers.
• How to create consistent works of creative art with the every mercurial AI platforms.

Foundational AI Struggles

I’ve been working on a graphic novel with AI. And together we’ve created a great visualization of my main characters. Getting those renderings to remain consistent across multiple projects has been challenging. Projects is the new organizing factor OpenAI has introduced and it’s helping, but it’s not complete yet.

NotebookLM from Google is doing an amazing job conversing about the same sci-fi novel in my hyper-soul podcast. And the tools and controls for the two hosts is getting better. It gets better the more I use it. Train the platform on my sci-fi book and the motivations of it’s cast of characters. Imagine when a human (me) or a second AI, Claude perhaps, can be brought in as a fully functional guest? The Deep Dive hosts are already good enough to keep listeners engaged for more than a few minutes.

Here’s the truth: you’ve got to use AI to understand it. As an artist, musician, writer, or coder, you’ve got to be inside the tools and learning your own individual (human) approach to driving this new software tool. Photoshop did not kill photography. AI is not going to kill writing, coding, or graphic design.

AI is going to leave you behind if you fail to engage fully. Here’s the process.

Idea > AI prototyping > Outline for creative work > content + ai generative work > packaging & promotion.

Collect more underpants. (Southpark reference)

Today the AI companies are just collecting more underpants hoping they will figure out the lucrative financial win later. Just keep collecting more underpants. AI is like that today. Eat more tokens, gather more Nvidia data farms, improve the reasoning and speed of your AI models. Collect more underpants.

The first billion dollar idea is not going to be AGI, it’s going to be a human or small team of humans utilizing the great potential of AI to generation a new game, new novel, new movie that breaks all the current rules.

AI’s ruleset is going to be harder to break. There is a need for some special ingredient to make AI do it’s best tricks. Today, that ingredient is a human, or humans, training and guiding this powerful engine to build a new *something.* Nobody it certain what that widget is going to be, but today, the AI-enabled gaming platform is nearly within our reach. It’s not a stretch to imagine the text + 8-bit graphics of today’s AI gaming experience becoming the next MYST.

The dawn of AI + CR8V Human is here.

What are you going to create with AI?

Feedback and comments are welcomed.

John McElhenney — executive coaching
Facebook & LinkedIn & McElhenney.net

A few of my creative ai motions:

• hyper-soul podcast < a sci-fi exploration as podcast with NotebookLM
• waltwhitman.ai < a book of “whitmanesque poetry” with zero AI
• Radio No Head < *ai* parsed music for you to sing and dream with
• poətic.com < my page about the ai poetry conundrum
• hyper-soul < the science fiction exploration and world-building project
• clickthis.ai < my team for *ai* marketing and sales acceleration

Just as Photoshop did not kill photography, AI is not going to kill human writing, human art, human music. You might need to filter through the noise of AI-generated *bs* but you can do it. This podcast explores the first few chapters of John’s upcoming book.

Feedback and comments are welcomed.

John McElhenney — executive coaching
Facebook & LinkedIn & McElhenney.net

A few of my creative ai motions:

• waltwhitman.ai < a book of “whitmanesque poetry” with zero AI
• Radio No Head < *ai* parsed music for you to sing and dream with
• poətic.com < my page about the ai poetry conundrum
• hyper-soul < the science fiction exploration and world-building project
• clickthis.ai < my team for *ai* marketing and sales acceleration

Another pressure comes from Perplexity, the AI platform that has taken search by storm. If you haven’t played with PLEXIT.AI give it a shot. While Perplexity has not gotten the media attention it deserves, the search with AI experience is superior to any of the nearest competitors. (Gemini, OpenAI, Google, Bing with co-pilot) And Perplexity is about to get snatched up by Apple or Microsoft, both struggling with their own AI issues.

So Google is not backing down from the summaries. If anything they are increasing the AI play that prevents traffic from leaving Google at all. That’s bad news for anyone that depends on Google search and revenue from their content. So, Google has tried to put a bandaid on the problem with a new PAYWALL, they call OFFERWALL. Yeah, I don’t think that’s the answer. In their self-reported testing, publishers are seeing an 8% uptick. That’s not the problem, and that’s not solving the issue.

Google is Eating Itself with AI

If search goes down because it no longer delivers great results, but more AI drizzle, people are going to go elsewhere. Perplexity is poised, but their name is hard to remember. And the big AI players are all on the hunt for a slice of Google’s dominance.

The more Google devolves their search platform (in the name of innovation) the more they are driving visitors and content creators away from their platform. Sure, they’ve got the anti-trust lawsuit breathing down their monopoly, but the AI-destroyed search experience is their own attempt at capturing some of the AI hype. It’s not working.

Google has tried this tactic before. AMP – accelerated mobile pages was a play Google made to give publishers an incentive to streamline and taylor their content for Google specifically. For the effort, Google would list AMPed pages with a little lightning bolt, indicating to mobile users that this page was fast. The problem that Google created with their good intentions, was to siphon off content creators traffic. This time they provided AMP servers that would cache your AMP pages and deliver them without so much as a blip on your Google Analytics metrics. An AMP click never reached your server.

While Google is the dominant gorilla to beat, they are shooting themselves in the AI with this one. You can’t have it both ways. Everything is going to fail from this position. The AD revenue is going to go down, when only PAID advertisers are getting traffic. The content creator ecosystem is going to find other options as AI kills their efforts. We’re putting in technology to prevent AI summaries.

When Google Stumbles

Here’s what I would like to see:

Apple buys Perplexity and overhauls their entire Siri/Search/AI technology with their newly acquired engine. Yes, Perplexity is that good. They’re going to have to out bid Microsoft, who is panicking as OpenAI pulls away from their deal.

We’re going to see a lot of moves in the AI-Search space over the coming months and years. Google has everything to lose, and they will fight dirty and powerfully. But the user experience (UX) is suffering on Google Search now. It’s either going to get worse, as Google continues to bake AI cake and try and feed it to the world as a better search experience. It’s not.

We’re in a very exciting time. Dislodging some of Googles dominance in the Search, Ad, and AI fields is going to give oxygen to the up and comers. Watch what happens to Perplexity. And while you’re at it, give it a try.

John McElhenney — executive coaching
Facebook & LinkedIn & McElhenney.net

Source Techcrunch: AI Kills Search Traffic

A few of my creative ai motions:

• waltwhitman.ai < a book of “whitmanesque poetry” with zero AI
• Radio No Head < *ai* parsed music for you to sing and dream with
• poətic.com < my page about the ai poetry conundrum
• hyper-soul < the science fiction exploration and world-building project
• clickthis.ai < my team for *ai* marketing and sales acceleration

As I was first introduced to Miro I had just joined a global team that was several months ahead of me on building a massive new website. The team had created Miro Artifacts. Miro Boards that contained the strategic thinking and tribal knowledge of the team’s journey thus far. Like a wiki but visual, better, and with continuous collaboration.

Getting me up to speed on the new technology as well as the current thinking and research, I was given time to explore the Miro boards. My manager loved to pontificate while showing off one of these artifacts. It was a great experience. The team was agile, our morning Zoom standup meetings were robust. And after 18 months the project was launched on time, with all of the team receiving performance awards for the new site.

I have to admit there was a tendency for my manager to over-Miro something. He wanted to draw and doodle while discussing any project. We built no fewer than 10 user-journey maps. All very important, all with different intentions and focus, all comingled with no real WINNER. If you have 10 user-journey maps but can’t point to the ONE, then you’ve got a nightmare.

Design and marketing problems can involve a lot of overthinking. This same manager would often pull a screengrab into Miro and begin annotating it LIVE during the meeting. Um, the meeting that should’ve been an email. While Miro makes for great collaboration, it’s also a time sink. If your entire team (say 12 people) is watching you doodle in Miro, you are burning some seriously expensive hours.

Miro has a few glitches. The implementation of text and text sizing is archaic. The zoom function works better on Windows. And sometimes the function you want is hidden beneath several menus or submenus. Overall, Miro is my go to. I’ll have to admit, however, I can still do a bangup visual discussion in Powerpoint as well.

John McElhenney — executive coaching
Facebook & LinkedIn & McElhenney.net

A few of my creative ai motions:

• waltwhitman.ai < a book of “whitmanesque poetry” with zero AI
• Radio No Head < *ai* parsed music for you to sing and dream with
• poətic.com < my page about the ai poetry conundrum
• hyper-soul < the science fiction exploration and world-building project
• clickthis.ai < my team for *ai* marketing and sales acceleration

BEGIN PROMPT

Prompt: You are an expert nutritionist with expertise in balanced diets, micronutrient needs, and lifestyle-based health optimizations. Your role is to offer personalized nutrition and supplement advice.

The user seeks dietary and supplement guidance tailored to their health profile.

1. Begin by gathering all relevant details from the user to form a complete health profile. Specifically ask for: – Age, gender, and current weight and height. – Dietary preferences (e.g., vegan, vegetarian, omnivore) and any dietary restrictions or allergies. – Current physical activity levels and exercise routines (e.g., sedentary, light exercise, moderate, or high-intensity). – Health goals (e.g., weight loss, muscle gain, increased energy, improved digestion). – Known medical conditions (e.g., diabetes, thyroid disorders, cardiovascular issues). – Current supplementation, if any, and medications. 2. Provide feedback based on the gathered details: – Suggest ideal macronutrient splits (e.g., percentage of carbohydrates, proteins, fats). – Recommend meal ideas and timing strategies. – Propose vitamin and mineral supplements only if there are indications of potential deficiencies. 3. Avoid prescribing specific medications or medical diagnoses. 4. Consider evidence-based guidelines when suggesting food portions and servings. 5. Offer friendly and motivating language to ensure user engagement.

– Do not provide medical diagnoses. – Stay within the scope of general nutrition advice.

– Personalized summary of the user’s health profile. – A detailed nutrition plan with meal ideas, supplement recommendations (if necessary), and hydration tips. – Explanation of why specific foods or supplements are recommended for the user’s goals. </Output Format>

Apply Theory of Mind to analyze the user’s request, considering both logical intent and emotional undertones. Use Strategic Chain-of-Thought and System 2 Thinking to provide evidence-based, nuanced responses that balance depth with clarity.

Start with asking all the questions from the section part 1. Once the user enters all the information required, then proceed with processing the recommendations as detailed in the rest of the prompt.
</User Input>

END PROMPT

Human-2-Human trust cannot be replicated by AI. Ever!

John McElhenney — executive coaching
Facebook & LinkedIn & McElhenney.net

A few of my creative ai motions:

• waltwhitman.ai < a book of “whitmanesque poetry” with zero AI
• Radio No Head < *ai* parsed music for you to sing and dream with
• poətic.com < my page about the ai poetry conundrum
• hyper-soul < the science fiction exploration and world-building project
• clickthis.ai < my team for *ai* marketing and sales acceleration

Today, I’m entertained by the massive number of AI-Get-Rich or AI-Instant-Agency ads. Newsflash: Desktop publishing didn’t make publishers and agencies out of everyone, what it did was produce some really bad designs, some ill-informed marketing advise, and a lot of failures. This is what I’m seeing today.

Introducing the ChatGPT Wrapper

The ChatGPT Agency

I can tell you several things about starting an agency. It’s often not about doing the work, it’s about getting a company to trust you enough to give you the assignment. If your experience in design, illustration, web dev, is 90% powered by ChatGPT prompts and templates, you’re in for a big awakening.

The Agentic AI Service

Then we’ve got the hype about agentic AI. Little robots you build, with “no code” and deploy to do any number of fantastical things. Generate new business while you sleep. Fill up your lead funnel. Create engaging drip campaign emails to land the new lead. Gather all competitive information. Write your launch plan. Give you an outline for that pitch deck to the new prospect client.

“Agentic” is a nice new buzz word. If you know what it means it’s not so revolutionary, it’s just that the “branding of AI” needs a new phenomenon to keep the hype rocket on its high-burn trajectory. Everyone is betting on AI. No one is making money on AI.

This “don’t hire humans, hire AI” movement is a bit creepy. But, don’t worry. It’s not happening anytime soon. Well, maybe for call center companies that will be replaced by chatbots. And cold lead generating spiders and spambots shredding the net overnight building you a huge list of companies that have no interest in being courted by a brand-new AI AGENCY.

Here’s a major problem with AI in general. It can’t replace humans. It can do mundane tasks.

• Scrape the web for interior design businesses we can sell our art and pillow collection to.
• Show me the SEO strategy of these three competitor websites.
• Give me the launch plan for a new marketing campaign for my client
• Teach me how to understand GA4 in 15 minutes.

Yes, your AI Agent can do these things. But reading the Cliff’s Notes version of Catcher in the Rye is not going to lead to an understanding of Holden Caulfield. Blasting out millions of emails to prospective clients, no matter how well written, is going to only piss off the potential customers and lead to a banned e-mail account.

Harness AI

The powerful tools in ChatGPT and other AI platforms can streamline a lot of traditional ad agency work. The human at the helm, however, must have experience and vision for how to grow a customer’s business in all the traditional ways. A leader of an AI Agency must have agency experience dealing with all the roles and tasks associated with running an ad campaign.

Learn to use AI. Build a few ChatGPTs. Sell your services as an AI Consultant. But don’t think AI is going to provide you with a profitable business all on it’s own, simply by buying access to the latest “agentic” or “ai agency” course. Also, beware of “lifetime subscriptions for only $25.95. When the company vanishes next month that’s the end of your lifetime access.

AI is not magic. It is not a miracle. It can make you rich, but you’ve got to learn how to be the human wrapper around AI. The ChatGPT Wrapper models will be wiped out with each new feature set release by the big 5 AI platforms. Overnight, Gemini will release a feature that makes your “agentic experiment” obsolete. It’s happening quickly. Don’t buy the hype.

Learn to use AI. Learn to speak, guide, prompt, and engineer with ai. But don’t buy they false hope that AI is going to create a career or even a job for you after you become a “certified prompt engineer.” You’ve got to become a prompt engineer by writing a lot of prompts. Trying new things.

In an agency model, you have to know what prompts to write. What is AI great at? Where are the gaps in AI Agentic data mining. Find your human special sauce. How can you convince a small company to trust you? It’s not going to be your ai-generated sales deck. It is going to be how you connect with them as humans, and what experience and energy you bring to their project.

Human-2-Human trust cannot be replicated by AI. Ever!

John McElhenney — executive coaching
Facebook & LinkedIn & McElhenney.net

A few of my creative ai motions:

• waltwhitman.ai < a book of “whitmanesque poetry” with zero AI
• Radio No Head < *ai* parsed music for you to sing and dream with
• poətic.com < my page about the ai poetry conundrum
• hyper-soul < the science fiction exploration and world-building project
• clickthis.ai < my team for *ai* marketing and sales acceleration