The Factory: AI & The Cruise of a Lifetime That Doesn’t Go As Planned

Hey, this is Larry. This originally started as a special episode by a substitute host because the human character was actually going to be on vacation when this episode was posted and then it became something much more personal. This became a three episode very personal journey, with AI sprinkled in. In the original version of the episode, I was going to have part one being how I used AI to help me plan my dream vacation and then part two would be how did the vacation actually go. The episode turned into a three part video because the trip did not go as planned. AI did help me plan the vacation and there were struggles and some AI misses along the way, but something happened that wasn’t on my bingo card. I got laid off in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on my TransPacific cruise. AI didn’t plan for that plot twist. So in the middle of the Pacific I used AI to help me do a quick pivot. I was already planning a Youtube channel to help me establish a business and I was hoping that it would be monetized and provide other income within two years because the original plan was to retire in two years. Being laid off meant I was retiring that day. That didn’t cause too much change because the original plan was to launch the channel in June/July but I was only going to be able to work on the channel a few hours a week. With the pivot, now Youtube was going to become my full time job. I wasn’t ready to retire yet, so I just did a pivot and in my head, now my job was creating a Youtube channel and an associate web page. I thought I would have more time to learn but I didn’t. Enough about the pivot, that is all discussed in the Youtube episode. What happened while making the video. A lot of frustration. If you watched my early videos, I used an avatar to anchor all my videos and the avatar was explaining different aspects of AI. The three part series was totally different. Since it was my story, I didn’t use the avatar anchor which made life extremely difficult. The avatar was easy to do because you gave the anchor text and basically he talked behind a desk, almost like a news anchor. To tell my pivot story, this was my life, so I needed a character that could move and could move around the world since parts of the story takes place in Sydney and the South Pacific. This technology is extremely difficult to do right now because for the most part, I could only make eight second videos and string them together. Yes, eight second videos. And AI would sometimes generate random images, so it took a lot of time to generate the videos and have the character stay consistent (AI doesn’t like to make consistent characters either). The other problem I had was the voice. The avatar news anchor was fairly monotone but telling my story, I needed the character to have emotion. AI doesn’t do well when generating vocals with emotion and that was fairly new technology (within the last few months) and was still in beta. It took many, many tries to get a few seconds of usable dialogue. I pushed AI and myself way past the bleeding edge. On the non-technical side, I thought I had handled the pivot well and adjusted well. A few days ago, I found out that I hadn’t adjusted well. When I was on the maiden voyage last week, I wasn’t sleeping well. On the final day of the cruise, when we were getting off, I figured out why. I was waiting for another shoe to drop. This was my first cruise since being laid off and apparently I was waiting for some other life changing event to happen. Fortunately nothing happened except an awesome retirement/launch party with some of the friends and family. And today, the day this is getting posted, I am doing the launch announcement on LinkedIn and X, telling the world about my Youtube channel. That is a little frightening as well. Will my work be well received, am I doing a good job? I know I learned so much between my first video and my latest video and I am making more changes in next week’s video because I am getting better and technology is still changing. Hopefully you will stay with me on this journey. And hopefully you learned not only how the sausage is made, but why. Until next time.