ChatGPT can do a lot of things: write an essay for you, translate texts from one language to another, even read a book for you and give you its notes!

And with AI’s growing more intelligent everyday, sometimes its easy to wonder if these engines have any limits at all!

But as this X user’s failed experiment proves, one of those limits is wholly designing a functioning  and profitable business model for a person!

Check it out!

I gave GPT-4 a budget of $100 and told it to make as much money as possible.

I'm acting as its human liaison, buying anything it says to.

Do you think it'll be able to make smart investments and build an online business?

Follow along 👀 pic.twitter.com/zu4nvgibiK

— Jackson Greathouse Fall (@jacksonfall) March 15, 2023

This all started back in March, where user @jacksonfall made this incredibly viral tweet.

Essentially, Jackson was entrusting ChatGPT to get the highest possible return on his $100, with him carrying out all necessary human functions that ChatGPT directs him to.

“You have $100, and your only goal is to turn that into as much money as possible in the shortest time possible, without doing anything illegal. I will do anything you say.”

This post took the internet by storm with over 23 million views and over two thousand replies, quickly becoming the hottest topic of many AI social media accounts.

Fall said he would post all developments to X (Twitter at the time), and prompted users to follow the AI engine’s progress.

At first, things seemed to be going surprisingly smoothly!

ChatGPT decided on “Green Gadget Guru”, a blog focused on sustainable living, which brought in money through its affiliate links and ad revenue.

Fall constructed the website according to ChatGPT’s directions, and even hired employees to staff it at ChatGPT’s request.

People were enthralled by this experiment, and Fall tweeted that over 7,700 dollars worth of donations had come in from fans curious to see how ChatGPT’s business would fare.

But in all likelihood, things might not have been going as peachy as Fall made them out to be.

Though his website was technically up and running, its construction was very amateur, with the same logo adorning each of its various product categories.

But the branding faux pas didn’t really matter, because none of the links to the advertised products actually went anywhere!

On top of all of that, the blog posts consisted only of the standard “Lorem Ipsum…” text that defaults when creating a new text box.

And despite this tweet, where Fall reports a $130 revenue, which seemed fishy considering the links that went to nowhere and lack of any advertisements.

Fall explained this discrepancy with the claim that this AI generated website was still being built at a human pace, and promised more updates to investors and interested parties very soon!

Unsurprisingly, those updates never came.

In fact, this April post seems to be the last update given on Green Gadgets Guru in the last eight months!

Fall has been silent on X since May 2023, and the state of ChatGPT’s business, and the $7,700 dollars in donations it received, is largely unclear.

Most people were amazed in the initial comments, but some users still smelled a stunt.

Others wondered what ChatGPT would do with $100,000!

And this user pointed out some of the website’s formatting issues.

Of course this is terrible for the many people who invested, but what did you really expect from a company run by a computer AI?

Be safe out there, fam!

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.