[Hoot Gibson]

Hoot, have you identified any ways to make money in AI as a side hustle in early semi-retirement?

Funny you should ask that question. My wife and I were discussing that topic this morning. The possibilities are unlimited. The key is to identify things that could create small income streams with minimal investment of time or money. This high school football ranking program is a learning exercise for me. One of the things that the application does is "scrape" football game scores of of web pages. I just finished importing the scores of all games scheduled/played in Ohio during 2024 and 2025.

I still have some debugging to do on the Ohio score scraping and calculation of ranks, but the technique of automatically scraping content from web sites is already used by people to promote products by displaying photos and prices related to the content of a web page. They make a little money on ads and a little more money through affiliate links. I am guessing that I will need another full day to add Indiana high schools to the ranking program. That is 4 days to create the application and set it up to work for 3 states. That includes 765 lines of code, not including the formulas that I created to format the Excel files containing lists of teams for each state and links to each team page containing schedules. The AI can write code in virtually any programming language, so it is capable of automating tasks in any application that allows scripting.

Another potential source of side income is using AI to create scripts to automate part of the laser engraving/cutting process. I am considering buying a UV printer to use in conjunction with the laser. My wife and I used to sell laser cut mirrored acrylic license plates with inlaid mascots, player numbers, and names. That was a tedious process and not a very profitable one. Using an AI to assist in the design of products and to generate scripts to automate part of the cutting/engraving process, I can make the whole process much faster and cheaper. I believe that the UV printer would allow me to produce products like novelty license plates almost as attractive as the inlaid plates, but faster and for a decent profit margin.

In the not so distant future, affordable AI models will be able to produce videos containing content suitable for upload to Youtube and similar social media platforms. One person who is proficient at writing AI prompts will be able to produce multiple channels of content without any employees and without needing to appear on the screen. AI actors will soon be virtually indistinguishable from real people.

These are a few of the prospects that have me excited about the future of AI. I know what I can do with it today, and I have a pretty good idea what it will be able to do in a few years. As long as my mind remains fairly sharp, I can get things done at an increasingly effective rate while interacting with an AI using a keyboard or my voice. Semi-retirement with several small streams of passive incomes sounds appealing to me.

[Hoot Gibson]

Hoot it's safe to say I shocked my son big time last night! He was watching the Avengers or something like that.  When I looked at him and asked if I had AI set up on my phone? You should've seen the way he looked at me!

He first said I caught him off guard, because one of the characters in the movie he was watching was AI based. Then he said outta all the people he knew, that I'd be the last ever to ask about AI   While this conversation was taking place, Miss Kong was just laid back with her ear buds in, watching something on her phone Lol

My son said that Google is some how tied into AI. I actually found AI on Google search or something.  I started asking questions.  So I've been playing around with it some.  I also found the AI sites that You recommend. I might try to download one later. 

I even asked AI about myself and it pulled up quite alot of info.  I always got a kick outta googling myself Lol

I asked AI about Walleye fishing at Paintsville Lake.  Alot of info come up. It mentioned around the islands at Paintsville Lake.  That is spot on. Because we used to catch several Walleye around those islands years ago.  Just haven't fished for them much of late, nor have we heard of any being caught recently. 

Believe my son is still kinda shell shocked today that I asked about AI last night 

Google is one of the big players in AI. Their AI product is called Gemini. I use Gemini some at work for coding assistance and I use it on my Google Pixel phone instead of the Google Assistant. I also pay for a $20 monthly subscription that includes storage space and a few other things besides Gemini. I also use Anthropic's Claude AI at work.

I have been using Grok Fast Code AI to develop the football team ranking program, and I also have a subscription to ChatGPT. I am probably going to drop my subscription to ChatGPT because I am not using it as much as Grok 4 and I am spending too much money on subscriptions. The free version of ChatGPT is enough for me, considering the little time I have been using it lately.