I spent 6 weeks trying to make a very modest income with AI. Here’s what actually happened.

I’m posting this because I keep seeing people online claiming they’re making money with AI, side hustles, tools, prompts, whatever. I tried. Properly. And it went nowhere. This wasn’t “get rich quick”. I was aiming for a very modest amount per month. Something realistic. I’ve worked in large organisations for years, so I approached it like a real project, not hype. Here’s what actually happened. First I tried starting a blog (WordPress). That alone took way more time than expected. Setup, themes, plugins, decisions everywhere. No clear design. And the chatbot had absolutely NO CLUE about how to create and build a wordpress blog, even though it constantly told me how to do it, only to find that that was impossible then kept blaming Wordpress for changing its UI. SO annoying. Then I spent several weeks building a Ghost blog site. The idea was AI would surface rumours and I’d investigate or debunk them. This fell apart completely. AI could not provide *any* reliable sources for any rumour it generated (and it generated A LOT!) Since provenance was the whole point, the project was dead. If I couldn't prove there was a rumour, how could I disprove, reject or corrorobate it? In parallel I put up 4 Fiverr gigs. Carefully written with AI leading the way on how to correctly create a gig for maximum exposure. Low prices. Clear scope. Weeks later, zero orders. Maybe something comes eventually, but there’s no sign yet that this works at all. OK, probably not directly attributable to AI, BUT - it was AI that led me down this rabbit hole... I also explored a bunch of other AI-related service ideas. Every single one sounded OK until I asked basic questions like: \-who is actually paying? \-why would they pay someone who is basically cold calling them? \-what work already exists? \-what cost is being replaced? Once you force those answers, most ideas collapse pretty fast. Costs weren’t huge but they were real: ChatGPT Plus \~$50 Ghost blog \~$20 Plus six weeks of focused time Return so far: zero. What bothers me is how misleading the public narrative is. From what I can see, most people “making money with AI” fall into one of four categories: 1. they already had an audience 2. they’re selling to people who want to make money with AI 3. they’d earn the money anyway and AI gets the credit 4. they’re exaggerating or lying AI is useful. I still use it. But as a way for an individual to create *new* income from scratch? I just don’t see it. I am posting this because negative experiences don’t get shared much, and I suspect a lot of people are quietly finding the same thing and assuming they’re the problem. I don’t think I was. Postscript - and THIS is ironic. I got the chatbot to write up exactly why you should not use AI in the way I wanted to generate a small income. But Reddit would not accept it because it was written by an AI!! So even *criticising* AI monetisation using AI tools can get you blocked from the places where the warning would matter most!