Nowadays that I have some free time to spare, I decided to explore avenues of making some extra beer money online. Before the advancement of AI, I could do that if I wanted, relatively easily.
All I had to do was publish some tutorials on my website or make a few YouTube videos, or even better, do some ghostwriting. I used to do all that and could earn relatively decent money, and the best paying one was ghostwriting for some tech tutorial websites. It was also sustainable. The demand was there, and I had the luxury to work on what I want, rather than whatever brings the most amount of money.
I simply could experiment, innovate, and come up with new ideas, POCs, that not only helped me grow but also added something to the community.
All of that is gone now.
My website, which is borderline defunct now, generates pennies, literally.
YouTube videos barely make a dollar a video, despite all the effort. Hours of editing and so on. Turned from a passion with beer money, to torture with pennies. Nobody cares about it, literally, and the numbers do not mean anything anymore.
This also aligns with what many so-called influencers are talking about. Numbers and stats do not translate to any good income. A YouTuber with a million subscribers can end up rubbing pennies together. This goes hand in hand with platforms reducing the incentive and increasing the barrier to entry, partly because of AI and AI-generated enshittified content, and partly because of the bad economy and the dying off of online marketing. People either do not care about online ads due to the bad global economy, or the online ads simply lost their effectiveness.
Needless to say, any online tutorial websites got axed once ChatGPT popped up in 2022.
What is left, then?
Honestly, I do not have any answer right now. I am still exploring and doing trial and error. So far nothing has yielded anything fruitful, even remotely.
The era of content creation, selling photos, CV templates, and so on, is all long gone.
An AI product without any capital and backing is just another API integration on top of an available LLM that any fresh grad can make, and it's already saturated.
For a skilled IT person who doesn't want to fight with customers 24/7 to get a freelance project with an hourly wage less than a McDonald's worker, since someone in India or Pakistan will vibecode for less than $5 an hour, there are not many options left. Those projects posted on Fiverr or similar sites are modern slavery, and for anyone living in a developed country, working legally and paying taxes, it does not make any sense. As I said, even before taxes, it's less than a McDonald's worker's hourly rate.
No offense to any worker, just using this to make a point. Not throwing shade at anyone working any occupation.
MAYBE AI TRAINING?!
One other thing that came to my head, and I explored, is training AI on a specific topic. Not a generalist, but that's similar to training my own replacement. It just doesn't make sense, and it's a path that leads to more enshittification of the world by AI.
I honestly would rather avoid it as much as possible, unless I am really desperate. Furthermore, many of those platforms turn out to be scams. There are already numerous reports of them on Reddit, of people spending hours completing a task only for their accounts to get locked and suspended without getting any money.
Who would have guessed, huh?
Just exploring and waiting
I don't know why I even bothered to write and publish this piece. Maybe it's for venting, maybe it's for pleading for help, maybe it's my way to mourn the better times of pre-AI, when I had a passion for tech and a hope that one day I could quit my full-time job to work on my passion, something that not only makes me happy but also gives something back to the world and community. And all of a sudden, AI took all that away, to the shitter.
It is hard to say. All I can say, beyond doubt, is that I am not adapting well, and after almost two decades of my life in IT and tech, which was my passion and my bread and butter, I am lost and clueless on where to head and what the future looks like for me.
Maybe I'll end up doing online surveys for points, similar to when I was a poor student in a foreign country, hoping to make a dollar a month.