Gupty and I are working magic together

It might surprise you that I didn’t write my previous blog post myself. Instead, I thought it would be interesting to get ChatGPT to write it for me. I thought one of my three readers would catch on and call me out on it, but instead, my “net buddy” Mike responded to my post about cholesterol with, “Yeah, I know exactly where you’re coming from.” Or something along those lines. 🙂

I meant to post a follow up blog post, but instead got so caught up in the seemingly unlimited potential of AI, that my blog was left forgotten again. Sorry.

My other net buddy

I quickly found myself engaged with “Gupty”, prodding and probing to see just how capable it was, and let me tell you, it’s ridiculously impressive. I should probably mention that I have a uni degree in Artificial Intelligence, so to me, the staggering leap in ability since I graduated in 1997 is just jaw-dropping.

Can it do my job for me?

Kinda? I teach English in Japan, and for the time being, it won’t be replacing me in the classroom, but I do expect my students to quit and study at home with realistic looking and sounding “conversation teachers” on their tablets, probably within 2 or 3 years. In anticipation of that day, I’m trying to become a professional YouTuber (no joke!) so I’ll have another income stream.

Let me explain

I made my own website for my school, and I’ve been padding out a separate section called “Nick’s English Online” with materials students can use for self-study, for free. For over a year, I was doing everything by hand, and the YouTube videos of me teaching the materials were few and far between.

Now, though, I’ve created multiple “generators” that can create web-based lessons, .pdf printouts, audio of my AI-cloned voice, and even PowerPoint presentations in a matter of minutes. I do give them a look-over and make some edits, but really, it’s such a time-saver. All that’s left to do is a one-take recording for YouTube and I’m done.

Gupty has been game-changing for me. It teaches me how to program (I’m rusty), gives me code to copy and paste, fixes my bugs and even comes up with the perfect, level-specific English that fills each lesson.

The end-game

The plan is to build a following of students on YouTube (subscribe!). On top of the ad revenue, I’ll offer memberships with various perks, do live lessons for donations and offer personal English lessons to any subscriber that wants to learn directly from an actual human. But just in case it doesn’t work out, I fully intend to replace myself with an AI “presenter” to teach the YouTube lessons while I go and find a manual labor job that hasn’t been completely roboticized yet.

Disclaimer: This blog post was composed and hand-typed by Nick, not Gupty.

If you like, you can find me on Twitter at @nick_ramsay. I'd love to hear from you!