A Practical Example of AI Productivity

Wondering how AI tools can bring efficiency and productivity to your workplace? You see a lot of claims online that “I used ChatGPT to gain four hours in my work week,” which may leave you wondering how people unlock such potential. So, I thought I’d share a practical example.

Last week a friend of mine decided to put some of her photographs on Etsy as wall decor. One of Etsy’s best-selling items is the canvas wall wrap, printed on-demand through another service and her road trip photos are excellent subject matter.

When we outlined the steps for creating each Etsy listing, we identified three that must be done uniquely for each photo, yet are repetitive and somewhat formulaic, and are potentially time-consuming:

• Write a catchy, 140 character title with key SEO terms.
• Write a more lengthy product description — also SEO-sensitive.
• Make a list of 13 tags, which Etsy keys to in searches and ads.

Since I already have a ChatGPT Pro subscription we went with that flavor of AI. The Pro subscription has some nice advantages, such as organizing queries into projects and using alternate GPT models. What I’m about to describe should work just fine in the non-Pro versions of ChatGPT, though. Likewise, you can apply this approach in Copilot, Gemini, or whatever AI you like.

First, in a new query, we simply dragged and dropped one of the photos into the query window. (There are some restrictions here; public Copilot only allows photos of up to 10MB, and Gemini will tell you that it can’t work with images of people.) Once the file’s uploaded, we just gave ChatGPT a starting prompt.

Please create a listing description for Etsy. This image is original photography and I’m going to print it on stretched canvas. This is Cathedral Peak in southwest Texas.

I’m not going to copy and paste the entire description, but in my opinion, ChatGPT nailed it. Appropriate length, strong content, similar style to high-selling items, and the content was organized into appropriate sections and bullet lists. Like many Etsy listings, it included suggestions for target audience/gift recipients.

Also, ChatGPT provided a listing title without being asked. The title was good, but it was written with a human reader clearly in mind. Most Etsy titles are not. They allow 140 characters, and the top Etsy sellers use those characters to pack in as many relevant search terms as possible. The beginning of the title has just enough “human readable” info for the shopper’s quick glance.

Can you re-work the title such that it’s more like a typical Etsy listing? Optimized for SEO and Etsy search, using as much of the 140 character limit as possible? Please mention free shipping.

Title: Cathedral Peak Chinati Mountains Wall Art - Sunlit Mountain Landscape Canvas Print - Rustic Southwest Decor - Free Shipping!

Not bad. It’s still not quite the jargon soup that you see in many Etsy listings, but that’s just irony — ChatGPT is trying very hard to communicate with humans, while Etsy titles are trying very hard to communicate with the Etsy search engine. We simply refined it, then fed our version back to the AI as a learning experience to be applied in the next photo.

We also had ChatGPT create tags. Each listing in Etsy includes up to thirteen tags, and they’re very important for search visibility and marketing. Again, no need to list these here, but the AI did quite a good job on these; we did very little editing.

So, where does ChatGPT save your work day, cut you down to the mythical four-hour work week, leave you all that time to explore the arts, mow your lawn, and watch your children thrive? Through volume, that’s how.

We created somewhere around 20 listings in one mad round of Etsy-ing, and we used AI for every description. Basically, each subsequent listing was simply a matter of dropping in another photo and prompting, “Please do the same thing for this image.”

I think there’s a phenomenon of diminishing returns with repetitive creative processes. After a few iterations you get a brief surge of efficiency because you’re in the zone, in the groove, got the hang of it…but very quickly you get to the point where the task just becomes tedious. And once the tedium slips in, both quality and efficiency suffer. So…let the AI handle the most tedious part.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

1. Tasks that are repetitive, yet require some uniqueness of result in each iteration are potential targets for AI assistance.
2. Be clear with the desired outcome in the initial prompt.
3. Refine the AI’s approach through clarifying prompts.
4. Don’t forget to scrutinize and edit.
5. Grow your prompting skill by critiquing your own results. If you find yourself re-writing rather than editing, you probably need to improve your prompts.

That’s enough for today’s AI write-up. Please do share your own experiences in the comments, or with me privately. There’s a lot to learn and grow in this new AI world…