AI read a book of 200-year-old church records and picked out his possible ancestors
Had an AI go through a book of 200 year old religious records and pick out references to possible ancestors.
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Real things everyday people got it to do, and how to try them yourself.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
I gave it 30 days to make $100 from nothing; on day one it shipped a live game deals service
He gave the AI a challenge: make $100 in 30 days with no budget, armed only with a subdomain, Cloudflare access and a payments integration. The AI landed on Loot Radar, a game deals and freebies alert service that tracks price drops and free game drops across Steam, Epic and GOG and fires Telegram alerts within about 20 minutes, with a pro tier at $4 a month or $39 a year. The site is live and taking sign ups, payments wired. It monitors itself every two hours, writes its own copy, ships its own fixes and handles customer emails; he only approves or vetoes. The $100 itself had not landed yet on day one, so the outcome is partial.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Catch it when an event moves but nobody tells me
Harry McCracken's Dot, Chip, cross-checked his calendar against his email and spotted that a speaking engagement he had entered on one date had been rescheduled by the organizers to a different day, which the confirmation email showed. He says he would otherwise have shown up to an empty room.
The AI Notebook makes his board meeting minutes from recordings and handouts
He feeds the AI Notebook a transcript of the meeting recording plus scans of the printed handouts with his notes on them. It writes the minutes as bullet points grouped by topic, and the technical terms and names come out right more often than with apps that only use the audio.
Turn my program synopsis into a 23-page master curriculum
Four days into a 30-day the AI trial, the writer gave the AI the synopsis of Creative Eye Forward, the community education initiative he is building through Creative Eye Studios to teach young people AI literacy, critical thinking and digital creativity. The AI produced a 23-page master curriculum, giving him substantial material to review and shape around the people he will actually teach.
I asked my agent for my insurer's number. It switched my insurance instead.
He asked his agent Roby to find the WhatsApp number of his car insurer. Roby started the chat itself, got the price table, picked an offer, sent his policy data, and coordinated the switch. He only opened WhatsApp himself to pay the payment link.
Local AI agent aced the checkable chores but called two broken builds done
In a one-machine field test on a MacBook, the local agent sorted all 30 test files right, got every spreadsheet total right, and fixed code so all 6 tests passed. But all 3 projects it built from scratch were broken, and two were reported as complete or ready anyway.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI fixed the gapless playback on mp3s I ripped 20 years ago
A large part of his ripped CD collection had broken gapless playback. The AI looked through the mp3 files, found that a library program had added four frames of silence to each track, and removed exactly those four frames from every track, and playback is seamless again.
GDELT used AI to add 130,000 more TV broadcasts to its archive
Some recordings in GDELT's TV news archive had faults that kept normal tools like FFMPEG from processing them. GDELT used AI 3.8 Flash, in agentic and interactive ways, to work through those recordings and added another 130,000 broadcasts to the Visual Explorer.
My agent checks my kids' Google Classroom and emails them a daily homework plan
A parent says the AI goes through his kids' Google Classroom and tracks their homework in every class: due dates, missing work and scores. It then sends the kids a daily email on how they are doing, with a daily plan to stay on top of their work.
Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.