Superhuman: What can AI do in 30 minutes?

AI multiplies your efforts. I found out by how much...

The thing that we have to come to grips with in a world of ubiquitous, powerful AI tools is how much it can do for us. The multiplier on human effort is unprecedented, and potentially disruptive. But this fact can often feel abstract.

So I decided to run an experiment. I gave myself 30 minutes, and tried to accomplish as much as I could during that time on a single business project. At the end of 30 minutes I would stop. The project: to market the launch a new educational game. AI would do all the work, I would just offer directions.

And what it accomplished was superhuman. I will go through the details in a moment, but, in 30 minutes it: did market research, created a positioning document, wrote an email campaign, created a website, created a logo and “hero shot” graphic, made a social media campaign for multiple platforms, and scripted and created a video. In 30 minutes.

Take a look…

AI as Marketing Strategist

First, I needed to teach AI about my product, or, rather, to ask it to teach itself about the product. In order to be able to check the quality of the output, I used a product I knew well, a game I authored with Wharton Interactive, designed to teach leadership and team skills on a fictional mission to Saturn. I started with Bing, a GPT-4 model that is connected the internet, and drew on its research capabilities so that it could teach itself about my product and the market it was in: Look up the business simulation market. Look up Wharton Interactive's Saturn Parable

Now that it knows something, it is time to get Bing to play a particular role, so that it responds as a marketer. All you have to do to make that happen is to ask: Pretend you are marketing genius. We are going to launch the Saturn Parable. You should give me a document that oulines an email marketing campaign and a single webpage to promote the game.

It then proceeded to create the four emails. without me doing anything. Here is the text of the first one:

### Email 1: Introduce The Saturn Parable

Subject line: How to teach team leadership in a fun and challenging way

Message:

Hi {Name},

As a business educator, you know how important it is to teach your students the skills they need to become successful leaders in the real world.

But how do you do that in a way that is engaging, interactive, and relevant?

That's where The Saturn Parable comes in.

The Saturn Parable is a business simulation that puts your students in the role of leaders on a mission to Saturn's moon, Enceladus, in 2087. Each student has their own goals and agendas, and they must work together to unite multiple competing factions, set goals and directions for teams, develop and set winning experimental strategies by exploring the surface of a new planet, and negotiate with and outthink competing vessels.

The Saturn Parable is designed by faculty experts working with game designers and award-winning science fiction authors. It is unlike anything your students have experienced before, with crises unfolding in real time over the course of the mission.

Every choice your students make is evaluated, and used to create meaningful learning. They get detailed feedback, including reports on their team's performance, and actionable analyses of their own skills and decisions.

The Saturn Parable is the most advanced way to build and test leadership skills at the strategic, organizational, and team levels. It is useful for any classes touching on issues of leadership or team management, as well as corporate training efforts or retreats.

Want to see it for yourself?

Click here to sign up for a free demo of The Saturn Parable and discover how it can transform your teaching experience.

Don't miss this opportunity to take your students on an unforgettable journey to Saturn.

Sign up for your free demo today.

{Signature}

That is all correct, and pretty good! I won’t bother you with text of the others (they are also good!), but the goals of each are interesting:

• Email 2: Highlight the benefits and features of The Saturn Parable. Subject line: Why The Saturn Parable is the best business simulation for teaching leadership

• Email 3: Share a case study of The Saturn Parable. Subject line: How The Saturn Parable helped {Name of institution} improve student engagement and learning outcomes

• Email 4: Create urgency and scarcity for The Saturn Parable. Subject line: Last chance to sign up for a free demo of The Saturn Parable

1,757 words. 7 (good!) pages. Two prompts. 2 minutes and 40 seconds.

AI as Site Developer

Since Bing had all the knowledge about our campaign, I used it to start our website construction. I told it: Outline the webpage and what text and graphics it uses, you do not need to create the webpage, but do give me the text

I then used my second system of the day, GPT-4, to actually build the website. Bing can be unreliable at code, and has limited numbers of questions you can ask. So, I gave ChatGPT-4 the instructions above, and told it: You are an expert site designer. You are creating the launch announcement page for the Saturn Parable, outlined below. create the following webpage. Make it an HTML page that I can run on my computer. List any additional assets I will need to make it work and where to put them. (I did cheat a bit here, GPT-4 ran very slowly, and I got busy with other tasks, so, by the time I got the full HTML and css files, I was a few minutes over the time limit, but the results are still pretty interesting)

I also knew I needed to create 3 images: a logo, a “hero image” and an icon. I didn’t know what a hero image was or how large it should be, so I asked ChatGPT:

I turned to another AI, MidJourney, to create the images - I only had time to create the hero image (“mba students in futuristic space-like setting, Saturn overhead”), so I asked Bing to create the logo as well. I didn’t get around to the icon in the time limit.

The completed website:

Hmmm, I don’t love how large the image looks. I’ll tell the designer:

Unfortunately, I was out of time before I could ask for other improvements, but the AI would have been happy to help respond to any errors or issues, free of charge. (This kind of iterated editing feels very powerful, and everyone should give it a try)

AI as Social Media Manager

Back to Bing to get our social campaign running. Can you write me the social media campaign I need to promote this using the Wharton accounts on social?

Show me some examples of posts? It proceeded to give me posts for five platforms, here is a sample:

## Facebook

- Pre-launch: Are you ready to take your students on an unforgettable journey to Saturn? The Saturn Parable is a business simulation that teaches team leadership skills in a fun and challenging way. Sign up for updates and be the first to know when it launches. {Image of The Saturn Parable logo}
- Launch: The Saturn Parable is here! The most advanced way to build and test leadership skills at the strategic, organizational, and team levels. Don't miss this opportunity to try it for free and see how it can transform your teaching and learning experience. Sign up for your free demo today. {Video of The Saturn Parable trailer}
- Post-launch: "The Saturn Parable is the best business simulation I have ever used. It is engaging, realistic, and feedback-driven. My students loved it and learned a lot from it. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to teach leadership and team management in a new and exciting way." - {Name of educator}, {Title}, {Institution} {Image of testimonial with photo of educator}

## Twitter

- Pre-launch: Something big is coming soon. A business simulation that will take you and your students to Saturn. Are you curious? Stay tuned for more updates. #TheSaturnParable {Image of Saturn}
- Launch: It's time to blast off! The Saturn Parable is now live. A business simulation that teaches team leadership skills in a fun and challenging way. Sign up for a free demo and see for yourself. #TheSaturnParable {Link to sign up page}
- Post-launch: Join us for a live Q&A session with @ethanmollick, the creator of The Saturn Parable. Learn more about the game and how it can help you teach leadership and team management skills. Tomorrow at 10 am EST. #TheSaturnParable {Link to live session}

Finally, it looked like I needed to do a video. Fortunately, I had an easy way to make one. I asked Bing for a script, used ElevenLabs to create a realistic voice, and D-id to turn it into a video. You can see it here!

It could use some additional images besides the realistic talking head (Bing had some in the script that I could add with standard video editing software), but that would have taken an extra few minutes, and I was out of time.

But I do want to point out one more thing. With the plugins announced this week, I could have actually asked ChatGPT-4 to run the email campaign for me! It is connected to email automation software, and could have actually handled the details itself. AIs can now act directly on the work, a prospect both exciting and anxiety-producing.

Superhuman

Here are three ways of looking at what I did in 30 minutes:

• Output: Bing generated 9,200 words or so of text and a couple images, GPT-4 generated a working HTML and CSS file, MidJourney created 12 images, ElevenLabs created a voicefile, and DiD created a movie.

• Input: I made less than 20 inputs to all the systems to generate these results.

• Content: I “created” a market positioning document, an email campaign, a website, a logo, a hero image, a script and animated video, social campaigns for 5 platforms, and some other odds-and-ends besides.

This would have been a lot of work for me to do. Many hours, maybe days of work. I would have needed a team to help: I have never done an email marketing campaign, don’t know CSS, and certainly could not have staged a photo like the one in the hero image. I am sure humans could have done better, but they could not have been as fast. And that, I think, is both the problem and the opportunity. When we all can do superhuman amounts of work, what happens? Do we do less work an have more leisure? Do we work more and do the jobs of ten people? Do employers benefit? Employees? I am not sure. Historically, these sorts of disruptions lead to short-term issues, and long-term employment growth. Hopefully, we will be in a future where we do less boring work, offloading the annoying and unfulfilling tasks, so that we can focus on the more creative and generative work we like to do.

The key is that I was able to do this using the tools available today, without any specific technical knowledge, and in plain English prompts: I just asked for what I wanted, and the AI provided it. That means almost everyone else can do it, too. We are already in a world of superhumans, we just have to wait for the implications.