[00:00:08.12] - Gordon Drayson
Hello.
[00:00:08.23] - Taylor Drayson
Hello.
[00:00:09.02] - Gordon Drayson
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:10.28] - Taylor Drayson
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:12.29] - Gordon Drayson
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast, where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And thank you so much for joining us.
[00:00:23.21] - Taylor Drayson
Welcome back.
[00:00:24.29] - Gordon Drayson
It's been another busy week. I've had lots of shows going on. In fact, I was at the Magic Circle this week on Tuesday because it's a bank holiday. And we had a VE Day celebration show, which I was invited to perform in. So I was performing at the Magic Circle, which was lovely.
[00:00:44.00] - Taylor Drayson
Very exciting.
[00:00:45.05] - Gordon Drayson
Yeah, it was a great show put on by a friend of ours, Norman Grinstead, and he put everything together and produced it all, which is a lot of work. So well done, Norman. Shall we get straight on to our topics?
[00:00:58.02] - Taylor Drayson
Yeah.
[00:00:58.13] - Gordon Drayson
Would you like to go first or shall I?
[00:01:00.08] - Taylor Drayson
You can go first.
[00:01:01.14] - Gordon Drayson
So today I want to talk about something I've been working through and Taylor helped me with and then I took over, which is creating a wordsearch. Now, I wanted to create a wordsearch that was a game that you could use on the internet, so one that you could use on your desktop and eventually mobile, and it needed to be customizable. So the plan is that when I have a booking for a children's show, I can automate a link for the customer that can be sent to them, and it will generate, on the fly, a wordsearch puzzle that will have the name of the birthday child as part of the the word list that you have to find.
[00:01:57.07] - Gordon Drayson
And I started to put down how I thought it should go, and then Taylor did the same and his was much better, so I took his over. But not only do I now have a wordsearch puzzle that works really, really well, but I've also learned a little bit about how you can create code using AI. Now, I think Taylor has spoken about this in the past, but I was using a service called CURSOR. And the idea with CURSOR is you basically give it a prompt like you would a normal AI, and it will start to write the code for you, and you can specify which AI you want to create the code for you, or you can just leave it at auto, and it will pick the one it thinks is best. And you can then test what it's doing and create a new prompt with any errors or add new functionality, and it goes through and it rewrites it all. Now, the CURSOR application that I was using is something that you download onto your computer and use, and it came with, I think it was 150 prompts as a trial, so a free trial.
[00:03:20.29] - Gordon Drayson
And then there's paid plans that you can move to if you want to after that, which I have done. I've moved a $20 a month plan, which gives me 500 prompts a month, and then unlimited slow prompts with using a different model, which is cheaper. And I learned an awful lot from doing that. One of the things I learned is WordPress Local, which I didn't... I knew existed, but didn't really understand what it was. It's another application. Is it available for PC as well?
[00:03:55.23] - Taylor Drayson
Yeah.
[00:03:56.23] - Gordon Drayson
So it's available for Mac, PC, probably Linux as well, I would guess. And it is an application that when you run it, it will create a local WordPress install for you. So you can basically work on your website offline without having to worry about the internet going down or without having to worry about plug-ins that you want to install and it takes time to do. You just download it and put it into your install offline. And once it's all done, you can basically export everything and import it into your online version, which is great. And I always recommend using a staging site if you're going to do that, because that will make a big difference as well.
[00:04:42.03] - Gordon Drayson
So you don't overwrite an existing site with something and potentially have problems. But yeah, having WordPress Local is a real change because you can actually, and this again is not recommended when you're coding, but you can actually edit the files live so that you can see what changes have been made by the AI, and you can just refresh the page you're on to see, if it's a WordPress plug-in as this one was, you can see what it's done, and you can test anything that you've asked it to fix. You can have a look. One thing I did find that was an issue was caching. So on a Mac, you can press option, alt, and E, and that will clear the cache and then reload the page, and that will then give you the latest version. So that's something I learned, which was annoying me for a long time because I made a change in the AI; I could see all the code changes; and when I refreshed, the issue was still there. So that was really annoying. So I learned that as well. But it's very interesting because you do still need to understand about coding.
[00:05:55.20] - Gordon Drayson
Now, I don't know a lot about coding, but I know enough to fudge my way through and to be able to explain to someone what I need it to do, which in this case is the AI, even though I may not know quite why it's doing it or how it's doing it. And with the AI, you can prompt it to create debug boxes, and it will then basically show you the debugging. It will ask for errors. It will ask for whatever contents a field has at that moment or an array, and then it can work out what's going on and why it's not changing and where the problem is. And I know enough about it to be able to do that. Can someone who doesn't know anything about coding write something? Yes, I think they probably could. Probably not really complicated, because the more functionality you add to something like this, the more complex the code becomes, and it's then really difficult if you've asked it to do something and then you change your mind or you add extra functionality that changes what you've done in the past, being able to explain it in a way so that it doesn't mess up what it's already done.
[00:07:15.20] - Gordon Drayson
So the more knowledge you have, which I think is the case with AI overall, the more knowledge you have on the subject that AI is helping you with, the better you will be. Does this mean that you can code stuff without having coders? Probably not. You can do smaller projects. If you wanted a whole website, I would not recommend using AI for that. There are services out there, but you're going to get very generic stuff and it's not going to stand out. So I wouldn't recommend it for that, at this moment. Who knows what's around the corner? I can only speak about what's happening in AI right now as of today. Next week, it may all change. But it's been a real eye-opener for me because I now have the ability to take existing code, ask the AI to look through the code, and then ask questions of it, or ask it to change things, or ask it to do things and add things, which will mean that I can do simple things myself without having to go to someone like Taylor to get it all sorted out and having to fit in with his schedule, because he's a very busy man you know, very busy man.
[00:08:33.05] - Gordon Drayson
And so it's been a bit of independence for me in a small way. I can do little things like that that I couldn't do before. Yes, I'm paying for the the service. And no, there isn't any help out there, but the AI will help you if you ask it to, and you know what to ask it. So, yeah, I'm quite pleased with my wordsearch. There's a couple of little tweaks I want to make to it, but it's now live on my website, and I'm able to send people to see the wordsearch, and there will be custom words in there, which is really exciting, and I'm really pleased it works. I'm going to make a cipher next, a cipher game where one letter equals another letter, and you have to figure out what they are to be able to figure out what the actual sentence or phrase that you're trying to decrypt is. So that's going to be fun. I can't see that being too complicated. The wordsearch got more complicated as we added things like scoring systems and having a timer in there and having hints, and penalties if you have hints, and things like that.
[00:09:48.00] - Gordon Drayson
So I was only adding these things because I could, because it was reasonably easy to do so. The other one thing I will say, if you do it on a live site, make sure you take backups on a regular basis because you could very easily lose two hours worth of tweaking and playing just because all of a sudden it stopped working and you've closed your chat window, you can't restore to a point that you had before and all of a sudden you nearly have to start over. So there's a little tip for you. But yes, CURSOR. We'll have a link to that in the show notes and please go and have a look if it's the sort of thing you think you might be interested in. Anything you want to add to that before we move on?
[00:10:33.13] - Taylor Drayson
I think, like you said, the more you know and more you understand what it's doing, the better results you'll get, because what you end up happening sometimes is you'll go around in a loop. Where you'll ask it to do something, it will sort of do it, but not fully; and then it will break something else. And then you then ask it to fix that, which then it fixes and then it breaks something else. And what happens is because you don't, sometimes you don't understand what the code is doing and what it's actually changing, you don't realise that actually if you just say, "don't do this, do this," you actually get the solution and you get the issue fixed first time. And so being able to actually read and understand what's happening, rather than just blindly hitting the accept button, the further you can go in a short amount of time.
[00:11:25.27] - Gordon Drayson
Yeah, so I had a couple of issues and Taylor actually looked at the code and said, "Ah, I think it needs to do this." And then he created a prompt that then fixed the issue, but he told it what to do and where the issue was, which is not something I'm able to do because I can't read the code as much at the moment. But this is all something that Taylor's pretty much self-taught himself. So he's learning every day with coding and adding to his skillset. And that can only help with AI, because AI can only help to a certain point. And you need to know what to ask it to get good results. There's a very old expression, which is gigo: garbage in, garbage out. So if you put rubbish prompts in, you'll get rubbish output. And that's very true with this, isn't it?
[00:12:18.02] - Taylor Drayson
Yeah.
[00:12:18.26] - Gordon Drayson
Right, what would you like to talk about?
[00:12:20.28] - Taylor Drayson
So I wanted to talk about using ChatGPT to generate interior designs.
[00:12:30.20] - Gordon Drayson
We're really on AI today, aren't we?
[00:12:33.16] - Taylor Drayson
So I have been trying to look at Pinterest and get some ideas of what I would like my flat to look like. And we went around IKEA last week and found a nice sofa, we found some nice furniture that was like, "oh, that'd be quite nice." And I wanted then to just see what it might look like in the space that I have available. So what I did is I uploaded a photo of the existing flat. I uploaded a photo of the sofa that we found, a light, a corner light that I found, and also just an example of a lounge that I liked that I just found on Pinterest, and it was like black shelving and units and things like that. And I gave it to ChatGPT and said, "Using the current layout of the flat, minus the furniture," because I don't, the furniture won't be there. "Please create a similar layout and interior design based on the furniture that I've given you." I also explained that I wanted the TV on the back wall instead of in the corner, and also the fact that I wanted a radiator cover because there was a radiator right in the middle, above or below where the TV would be.
[00:13:57.29] - Taylor Drayson
And so I wanted to hide that and also make sure that the heat wasn't just going to go onto the TV. And it did a really good job. It gave me a really, really nice idea of what the flat could look like and using the IKEA furniture and generic furniture that it knows about because people have already trained it on things like that and it has an understanding of those. And then I did the same for the bedroom. Again, I gave it one of the photos from the property listing, gave it an idea, said, "based on what you did before, which I really like, please design something similar." I asked it to include a mirror and some picture frames, a shelving unit, a TV.
[00:14:41.21] - Gordon Drayson
Making it homely.
[00:14:42.29] - Taylor Drayson
Yeah, and asked it to design something and then same for the hallway. And it did a really, really good job and managed to generate something that I had in my head, but I couldn't describe properly or couldn't find any examples of. I think what I wanted was very much similar to a lot of stuff, but at the same time not to the same extent as a lot of the stuff. And so it's hard to show somebody and say, "this is what I want" when it's completely different aspect ratios or the room's different or you have a window or something that doesn't exist in the example, the inspirational ones. And just gave me a lot of ideas of how I could lay out the room, how I could best utilise the space. And then also mention the fact that I wanted smart home things. So I think that's smart lights and stuff. And again, it took those into consideration. So it added little lights on the bedside tables, for example. It obviously had the tall light in the corner. It had LEDs. And so it took all the ideas that I had and just put it into a picture that I could visualise. So when people ask, "have you got any ideas?" I can show them this. And it's along a similar lines of what I would actually like it to look like.
[00:16:10.02] - Gordon Drayson
It's a good way to find furniture that you like and then see how it actually looks in the space that you've got without, actually having to purchase it, make it, in IKEA... You have to make IKEA furniture up most of the time. And just visualise it using AI, in this case, to see if it's the sort of thing you're looking for. And you could very quickly and easily go, "oh, actually, no, I don't like the look of that," and change your choice of furniture very easily before laying out lots of money and time.
[00:16:44.18] - Taylor Drayson
Yeah, and I was also able to say things like "add more greenery," so add more flowers or pot plants and pots and things like that, to see what it will look like. So instead of having to go out and actually buy those things and go, "actually, it doesn't look very good" or "looks a bit cluttered" or "I don't like this one," I could see what it would look like and how it would improve the room without actually needing to go out and buy all of the different smaller items.
[00:17:13.06] - Gordon Drayson
And we've said this before, but AI is just changing the way we live. And every week, it seems, there's a new use of AI that I hadn't considered in the past. Creating mock-ups for an actual flat, or writing code is not something that we were expecting a year or so ago, were we? And yet here we are, and things are changing all the time. So yeah, AI is definitely something to keep your eye on. As far as using it for business goes, I mean, there's lots of AI tools for writing, blog posting, creating images, music now as well. If you've got a video, you can have something like Suno that will create an audio track for your video, which is obviously going to be copyright free, and encoding as well. And there's lots of other uses coming up. So have a look at AI, see how it can work for your business. Anything else?
[00:18:16.08] - Taylor Drayson
I don't think so.
[00:18:18.00] - Gordon Drayson
Thank you for joining us. We hope that's been interesting for you. If it has, please like, share, and subscribe. We're on YouTube, and all of our past episodes are on there.
[00:18:29.02] - Taylor Drayson
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of the past episodes, show notes, and transcriptions for all of our episodes.
[00:18:35.19] - Gordon Drayson
And of course, we are on all the major podcast platforms. Just do a search for "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." You can also, I discovered the other day, ask your smart speaker. So if you say the smart speaker wake word, whatever that is, and then say, "play This Week With Taylor and Gordon," it will play the latest episode. So that was exciting. We'll be back with you next week. It's a busy week for me because I'm away, but we should be back in time for an episode next week. Until then, 1pm on Friday. My name is Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:19:12.24] - Taylor Drayson
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:19:15.09] - Gordon Drayson
Goodbye.
[00:19:15.26] - Taylor Drayson
Bye.
