Why Your AI Assumptions Are Costing You Time
This weekend I wasted half an hour redoing work I'd already finished—all because I didn't ask AI for what I really wanted.
What happened
My son needed a Warriors Cat manga book for Secret Santa. No shop had it in stock, and online delivery wouldn't arrive in time. So I decided to make one with AI.
I asked ChatGPT to create a story for an 11-year-old called Rachel who lives in Melbourne. It came back with a full comic book structure—title, character reference, 16 pages with panel descriptions, speech bubbles, sound effects, everything.
Then I hit my self-imposed limit…
Where I went wrong
When it came time to create the images, I decided to use Google Gemini Nano Banana. It’s my favourite AI for creating images right now.
I told ChatGPT: "Write an image generating prompt for each page. I’ll add the text later in Canva."
I decided to add the text manually later, because assumed AI couldn't handle text on images properly. So Gemini generated beautiful comic panels, and I copied them into Canva, and started manually placing text. It was hard! After two panels I thought, let me just try asking.
I went back to Gemini and asked it to add the text. It did it perfectly in seconds!
So now I took each one of the 16 pages it created, and asked it to add the text.
At two minutes per page, this is half an hour on manual work because I didn't ask for what I actually wanted in the first place.
What this really shows
We've been told AI is bad at certain things:
Maths and calculations (it predicts numbers as if it was text)
Formatting documents (they look basic)
Text on images (messy results)
References (it makes them up)
Most of these limitations are no longer true.
Microsoft Copilot now creates branded Word documents. AI uses scripts to analyse data and run calculations, far more accurately than guessing. Reasoning models reduce hallucinations, and checking references has become easier.
Why it matters
Every time you approach a repetitive task, pause and ask: what am I assuming AI can't do?
Those assumptions might have been true six months ago. They're probably not true today. And they definitely won't be true in six months.
The fastest way to waste time is treating temporary limitations as permanent.
Before you do something 16 times manually, ask AI for everything you want. The worst it can do is get it wrong, and even that teaches you where the real limits are right now.
—-
Inbal Rodnay
Guiding Firms in Adopting AI and Automation
Keynote speaker | AI Workshops | Executive briefings | Consulting CIO
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