Revealed: 4 Reasons Why You Can’t Make Money With AI In 2024

You watched the video. You followed the steps. You typed the prompts. And yet the money never came. If that sounds familiar, you are not alone, and you are not broken. The problem is not that AI does not work. The problem is a set of four specific mistakes that almost everyone makes when they first try to use AI to make money online.

Alston Godbolt has made multiple six figures online through affiliate marketing, digital product creation, and YouTube. In this video, he breaks down the four real reasons why most people fail to profit from AI in 2024. No hype, no “just follow this one trick.” Just honest, practical reasons backed by what he actually sees happening in the market every day.

What You’ll Walk Out With

The number one mindset mistake that kills AI income before you even get started
Why copying a popular YouTube AI strategy almost never works for the person watching
The real timeline for seeing results with AI-powered content creation
Why free tools are hurting you more than helping you right now
Practical ways Alston personally uses AI inside his own business without letting it replace him
A simple question you can ask yourself to find an angle nobody else is pursuing
How to find the specific online income path that fits your skills and situation using finder.platformproof.com

Reason 1: You Are Letting AI Drive Instead of You

The first and most fundamental reason people cannot make money with AI is that they hand over complete control to the tool. They open ChatGPT, type something in, and then publish whatever comes out without reviewing it, editing it, or putting their own perspective on it.

Here is what Alston noticed: AI output is often what he calls “too smart.” It reads like a textbook. It sounds like a corporate press release. If you asked ChatGPT to write about ways people earn money with AI skills, it might produce something like: “Many individuals offer AI-related services such as data annotation, machine learning module development, natural language processing, and so on.” That sentence is technically correct and completely useless for building an audience online.

Alston draws a funny comparison. He watches a YouTube channel where the creator pranks scammers. The scammers have a running tip they give to each other: “Don’t be too smart. Don’t be overly smart.” AI, left unchecked, makes that exact mistake constantly. The content comes across as formal, stiff, and hard for regular people to connect with.

One practical fix he recommends: when you are using ChatGPT or any other AI writing tool, tell it to write at a sixth-grade level. That small instruction dramatically changes the tone. The output becomes more conversational, easier to scan, and far more likely to hold someone’s attention on social media or YouTube.

But the bigger point goes beyond just the writing level. AI is a tool, not a business. You are the business. You are the one who understands what your audience needs, what angle nobody else is taking, and what your own experience brings to the table that ChatGPT simply cannot replicate. Alston says it plainly: use AI to grow your business, not as the entire business. The moment you stop being the driver, you become just another piece of generic content floating around the internet.

Reason 2: You Are Doing the Exact Same Thing as Everyone Else

This is the one that trips up the most people, and it is completely understandable how it happens. You watch a YouTube video from a successful creator. They walk you through their entire process: go to this platform, pick this niche, type in this prompt, hit publish, collect money. It sounds simple. You try it. And nothing happens.

Here is what that video did not tell you: at least 10,000 other people watched the same video. And at least 7,000 of them are running the exact same playbook. Alston uses a specific example to make this concrete. If you go to Invideo or a similar AI video tool and type “best places to live in Boca Raton,” you are not alone. A thousand or ten thousand other creators just typed in that same prompt after watching the same tutorial. You are now competing for the same search terms with the same type of content made by the same tools on the same schedule.

The result? Most of those channels get zero views. And when people point to the one channel that blew up using that strategy, they are only seeing the one winner out of thousands of failed attempts. You are not seeing the graveyard of identical channels that got nowhere.

Alston’s advice is not to stop watching other creators. His advice is to stop copying them. Instead, ask yourself: how can I take what this person is teaching and apply it to a niche nobody has tried yet? How can I flip it sideways and do something that sets me apart completely?

The online money game rewards differentiation. There are a million channels showing AI videos over a video game background with a robotic voiceover. That formula worked for the people who were first. Today it is so saturated that audiences scroll past it in under a second. If you want a shot at building something real, you have to find a way to stand out instead of blending in.

This is not just true for faceless YouTube channels. It applies to every AI-powered business model you might try: AI-written blogs, AI-generated social media content, AI tools sold to clients. Whatever the method, if 10,000 people are doing it the same way, the odds of you breaking through by doing it the same way too are extremely thin. Your job is to find the angle nobody else is working.

Reason 3: You Are Not Being Consistent

This one stings because it is so honest. Most people who try to make money with AI are not lazy. They are excited. They go hard for three or four days in a row. They upload every day. They follow the schedule perfectly. And then, when the views do not come and the money does not appear, the excitement runs out and the consistency disappears with it.

Alston says this clearly: YouTube videos promising instant results are lying to you, not necessarily on purpose, but because they are showing you the highlight reel without the backstory. The creator who went viral “overnight” was almost certainly grinding in the background for months with no one watching, no comments, and no revenue. That period is invisible in the success story you see. But it is the most important part.

Here is the honest timeline he gives: for most people, making money consistently online requires showing up every single day for three months, six months, nine months, and sometimes twelve months before the results become significant. That is not a discouraging statement. That is a filter. If you cannot commit to uploading or creating content on a consistent schedule for nine months, making money online is genuinely not the right path for you right now, and knowing that saves you a lot of wasted time.

If you can commit to it, consistency is actually your competitive advantage. Because most people quit after three days. If you are still going at month four, you have already outrun the majority of your competition. The algorithm rewards accounts that post regularly. Audiences grow when they know new content is coming. Sponsors and brand deals only come to channels that have proven they will not disappear in a week.

The practical step here is simple but not easy: create an upload schedule and commit to it. Write it down. Put it on your calendar. Treat it the same way you would treat showing up for a job you are being paid for. Because eventually, if you stay consistent long enough, it will become the job you are being paid for.

Reason 4: You Are Using the Same Free Tools as Everyone Else

This is the reason that connects back to the second one, but it deserves its own conversation. When Alston made his list of reasons people fail with AI, he specifically called out the problem of everyone reaching for the same free tools in the same order.

Here is the scenario he describes. You watch a tutorial. It tells you to use ChatGPT for the script, a specific free video editing platform for the visuals, and ElevenLabs for the AI voiceover. You do exactly that. But so do tens of thousands of other people who watched the same video. The output starts to sound identical. The same voice. The same editing style. The same pacing. The same types of thumbnails.

Audiences are not dumb. They pick up on patterns faster than most creators realize. Alston says it himself: the moment he hears that same recycled ElevenLabs voice on a faceless channel, he swipes away. He is not the only one doing that. When viewers tune out your content in the first three seconds, the platform’s algorithm notices and stops recommending it.

The free tool problem is really a differentiation problem in disguise. Because everyone has access to the same free AI tools, using only the free tools means your content ceiling is the same as everyone else’s. You are not just competing with other creators; you are creating content that is physically indistinguishable from the competition.

Alston is not saying you need to spend money you do not have. He is saying you need to think more carefully about where you apply the tools, how you combine them, and what you add on top that comes from you specifically. That might mean your own voice instead of a synthetic one. It might mean a niche perspective that no free tool can generate. It might mean combining free AI tools with your own unique research or life experience to produce something that sounds different from everything else out there.

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How Alston Actually Uses AI in His Business

It is worth understanding what Alston does differently, because his actual practice is a good model for how to use AI without making the four mistakes above.

First, he uses AI to generate customer avatars. When he is thinking about entering a new niche, he will prompt AI to build out a detailed profile of who the target customer is: their age range, what they worry about, what they have already tried, what language they use when they search. That gives him raw material to work with. But he does not publish the avatar. He uses it as a research input for his own thinking.

Second, he uses AI to brainstorm digital product ideas. He might describe a problem space and ask the AI to generate twenty possible product concepts. Then he takes that list and filters it through his own experience and judgment. The AI gives him options fast. He decides what is actually worth pursuing.

Notice what he does not do. He does not let AI write his sales copy and publish it unedited. He does not let AI run his YouTube strategy. He does not build a fully automated content pipeline and disappear. He stays in the driver’s seat at every step, using AI to accelerate his own thinking rather than replace it.

That is the model that scales. When you are the irreplaceable part of the equation, your business has something no one else can copy: you. The AI tools are available to everyone. Your perspective, your experience, and your judgment are not.

Honest Drawbacks of Trying to Make Money With AI

No honest conversation about AI income is complete without acknowledging what makes it genuinely hard. Here are the real drawbacks Alston’s video points to, stated plainly.

It takes much longer than the tutorials suggest. The creators making consistent income from AI-assisted channels or AI-powered services built their audience and reputation over months or years. The three-to-nine-month consistency window Alston mentions is a minimum floor, not a guarantee.

The free tools have a very low ceiling. If you are only willing to use free tools in the exact combination everyone else uses, you will produce content that looks and sounds like everyone else’s. That is a real ceiling on what you can build.

Saturation is real and fast. An AI income strategy that worked eighteen months ago may be completely oversaturated today. The window between “this works” and “everyone is doing this” has gotten very short. You have to stay ahead of that curve, which means always thinking about what angle nobody else is working yet.

AI output still needs a human editor. If you are publishing raw AI content without editing it, you are publishing content that sounds robotic, includes fabricated details, and misses the specific angle that would make it genuinely useful. The editing step is not optional. It is the step where your value gets added.

Overnight success stories are survivorship bias. When you see a video claiming someone made $10,000 in their first month with AI, you are seeing the rarest possible outcome, not the typical one. Building your expectations on those stories is one of the fastest ways to quit before you ever get traction.

A Simple Framework for Doing This Differently

If you want to actually use AI to build income in 2024 and beyond, here is a four-step framework that addresses each of the mistakes Alston identifies.

Step 1: Choose a niche nobody on the tutorial is targeting. Take whatever method you learned and ask: what completely different audience could benefit from this? What topic area is too small for the big creators to bother with but large enough for you to build a real audience in? That gap is where you start.

Step 2: Use AI for research and ideation, not final output. Let AI help you brainstorm, outline, and draft. Then rewrite the final product in your own voice with your own examples. The AI gives you speed. You give it accuracy and personality.

Step 3: Set a twelve-month minimum commitment before judging whether it is working. Pick your schedule (daily, three times a week, whatever is realistic for you) and treat it as non-negotiable. Track your numbers but do not base major decisions on what you see in the first ninety days. The data in months four through twelve tells you far more.

Step 4: Add one element that cannot be replicated by free tools alone. That might be your real voice, your specific industry experience, research you did manually, or a visual style that requires some effort to produce. That one differentiated element is the thing that makes your content recognizable and not interchangeable with the thousand other channels using the same template.

Find Your X

The four reasons in this video all point to the same root issue: people try to make money online with AI using a generic approach. Generic gets generic results. The fix is finding the specific path that fits your skills, your background, and the gap in the market that you are positioned to fill.

If you are not sure what that path looks like for you, visit finder.platformproof.com. It takes about two minutes and gives you a personalized recommendation based on where you actually are right now, not where some YouTube tutorial assumes you are.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it actually possible to make money with AI in 2024?

Yes, but the path looks different from what most tutorials show. AI is a tool that can speed up research, ideation, and content production. The people who are making real money with AI are using it to support a business they are actively running, not as a fully automated income machine that requires no effort or skill from them.

Why does AI content often sound unnatural or robotic?

AI language models are trained to produce grammatically correct and formally structured text. Without specific instructions, they default to writing that sounds professional and somewhat academic, which reads as unnatural in social media or YouTube contexts. You can counter this by asking the AI to write at a sixth-grade reading level and then editing the output further to match your actual voice.

How long does it realistically take to make money with AI content?

For most people, three to twelve months of consistent effort is a realistic window before income becomes meaningful. That timeframe shrinks if you are doing something genuinely different from your competition and if your niche has less saturation. It grows if you are in a crowded space using the same approach as everyone else.

What is the problem with using the same free AI tools as everyone else?

When everyone uses the same tools in the same order, the output starts to sound and look identical. Audiences develop pattern recognition very quickly and tune out content that feels generic. Free tools also have capability ceilings that limit the quality of what you can produce. Using free tools is fine for getting started, but you need to differentiate how you use them and what you add on top.

How do I find a niche that is not already saturated with AI content?

Start with what you already know. Your work history, hobbies, life experience, or local market knowledge are all potential niches that are far less crowded than generic topics like “best places to live” or “how to make money online.” The more specific and personal the niche, the harder it is for a faceless AI channel to compete with you in that space.

Do I need to show my face to make money with AI content?

No, but faceless AI content faces the highest level of saturation right now. If you choose to go the faceless route, you need to be especially intentional about finding an angle, a voice style, or a visual presentation that stands out from the sea of identical faceless channels. Many creators who do show their face have a real competitive advantage simply because the content feels personal and trustworthy in a way that AI voiceovers cannot replicate.

What does Alston actually use AI for in his own business?

He uses AI to generate customer avatars when entering a new niche and to brainstorm digital product ideas. In both cases, AI provides raw material that he then filters through his own judgment and experience. He does not use AI as his marketing department, his content creation department, or his sales machine. Those functions stay under his control.

What should I do if I have been trying AI income methods for months with no results?

Before quitting, audit which of the four mistakes applies to you. Are you publishing unedited AI output? Are you copying an oversaturated strategy? Are you posting inconsistently? Are you using the exact same free tools in the exact same way as every tutorial? Identifying the specific problem makes it much easier to fix. If the method itself is sound but you are executing it like everyone else, changing just one of those four variables can make a significant difference.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “Revealed: 4 Reasons Why You Can’t Make Money With AI In 2024”, YouTube: youtu.be/_Rsi4_RDh9M
Alston Godbolt, alstongodbolt.com, creator background: multiple six figures online via affiliate marketing, digital products, and YouTube
Platform Proof Finder: finder.platformproof.com

Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.