It’s Kind of a Funny Story Really

I initially made this site to be a bullshit “get rich quick scheme.” I was sitting in my office the other day — having completed all of my tasks and waiting to go home — and thought about AI and how it could very easily take a CEO’s job. After all, what do Chief Executive Officers really do except for make decisions? That could EASILY be outsourced to a Language Learning Model and save companies hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I wanted to test this theory, so I pulled up ChatGPT and input:

It generated a couple of side business ideas and provided a step-by-step plan for me to make them into a reality and start collecting cash. Unfortunately, these were all ideas that involved some form of marketing for small business owners like mechanics, dentists, and local coffee shops — aka real people. The whole thing felt like a scam to begin with, and I didn’t want to hurt real people. So instead, I asked for ideas that would target, well I’ll use my exact words from the prompt:

You can tell I have strong opinions about these sorts of folks.

The Language Learning Model suggested I build out a course on how to use AI to make extra money — exactly what I was trying to do — and then target the above mentioned audience. It would be a sort of hilarious “using the enemy’s own tools against them” type schtick.

Thus, SideDesk was born.

I had created an alter ego who worked in FinTech for his whole career and wanted to set out on his own by using AI to start various small businesses. Wanting to differentiate myself from the other AI gurus out there — and to have a trace of sincerity — I stayed honest: I started the blog to make extra cash for a car payment. Mostly true.

I built out the homepage, had ChatGPT write a couple of articles as well as a FREE “5 AI Side Hustles You Can Start This Weekend” PDF. The chatbot advised that I tie the PDF behind an email sign up page — that would be the way I get people’s info to sell them the entirely AI generated course on using AI to make money. How funny and quaint.

There were a few hiccups in this plot, however. For one, whilst I am a millennial who grew up with computers, I’m not a super tech genius who knows programming and such — contrary to the lore of my alter ego. In fact, my alter ego was almost my polar opposite in terms of my own interests. A version of me that chose the path of STEM instead of the path of liberal arts. I struggled with making the forms and embedding them in the original version of this website. The whole thing would reveal me to be a fraud.

So I slept on the whole project. And the more I thought on it, the worse I felt. This wasn’t true to me. It probably wouldn’t make me that much money, and even if it did, it was fraudulent money. I couldn’t go through with it.

Yet, I still have the domain side-desk.com. I didn’t want to waste the $33 I paid for it and WordPress Personal, so here we are. Instead of peddling a bullshit AI course, I’m using this space as a hodgepodge of whatever written crap I can conjure. If you don’t know anything about me, that’s probably a giant question mark for you. But I’ll make another post soon explaining who I am and what I do soon.

Until then, I hope this was mildly entertaining!