You’ve heard all the big claims about what AI can do and aren’t sure how much is hype and how much is actually useful. You might be thinking, “Can it actually do this? Are they just trying to sell me something?”

Here’s how you can start: give yourself a constraint. Pick a task you have to do and try to do the whole thing without leaving the chat. The key is to keep pushing until the task is done, instead of stopping at the first answer.

I started doing this to see how far I could push it. What interested me was getting it to actually do the work.

 

Trial and error

 

For example, I wondered how much it could help with the post-production of our live show on sales and marketing that we do every Thursday. So after an episode, I described the full task list and asked, “How much of this can you do?”

It replied, albeit with a little more verbosity, “Everything.”

So I decided I was going to do the entire process from that single chat interface. For this to work, I needed to give ChatGPT access to my desktop — that comes with risks. 

I pointed it to the video file on my computer and described what I needed: trim the beginning and end, cut out a section on a specific topic, create a YouTube thumbnail, and draft a recap article for RealEstateMagazine.ca. I also showed it where to find past examples of our work.

It asked some clarifying questions and 23 minutes later, I had everything. The edited video, the thumbnail, the recap article.

The first drafts were arguably good enough to publish. Then I decided to see if I could push it a bit further.

Some back and forth, and within an hour I had it where I wanted it. In my experience, getting there with people doing the work would have taken a week of back and forth.

Then I had it write the SOP for future episodes.

Don’t leave the chat until the task is complete

 

All of this because I played with the constraint of not leaving the chat to get a whole task done. I gave it examples, answered its questions, and kept asking for changes until I was happy with it.

That doesn’t mean it can do every task you throw at it or at a quality you’d be happy with. But it’s worth finding out how much it can do before deciding it can’t. Once you’ve seen it do the work, the next question is, “Am I comfortable letting AI do this for me?”

There’s still a lot we don’t want AI doing at both Real Estate Magazine and Just Sell Homes. Those are deliberate choices we’ve made. You need to make those decisions for yourself too. 

For example, I wrote this article then I asked AI to clean it up and the draft I got back was bland, boring, and removed everything that made it interesting. So I had it revert and just said, “Fix the grammar but leave it alone otherwise”

Your homework

 

Take a task you actually need to get done. Give it the full list, show it examples of what you want, and ask, “How much of this can you do?”

Then see if you can get the whole thing done without leaving the chat. If the first version isn’t what you want, tell it what to change. That’s where I found out how much further I could take it.

Where AI is today, it’s less “Can AI do this?” and more “Do I want AI doing this part?”