Alston Godbolt pulls back the curtain on the exact AI tools he uses almost every single day to run a five-figure-per-month online business. This is not a list of software someone compiled after reading an article. These are the five applications that show up inside his actual workflow, from the moment he plans a thumbnail to the second a blog post goes live. Some he uses five times a week. One he touches maybe once a month. He tells you exactly which is which, and why that distinction matters when you are deciding what belongs in your own tool set.
If you have been wondering how real online creators stay productive without burning out on manual busywork, this video is the honest answer. No hype. No “here is what the gurus are using.” Just five tools, what they actually do inside a working business, and how Alston fits them into a content operation that runs across YouTube, TikTok, and a blog that feeds both.
What You’ll Walk Out With
- The AI photo editor that makes YouTube thumbnails sharper without requiring Photoshop skills
- How Adobe Premiere Pro’s AI captions extend watch time on both YouTube and TikTok
- What Content at Scale does and how Alston is testing it on a live niche blog
- The transcription tool that turns one YouTube video into a fully formatted blog post in minutes
- The right way to use ChatGPT for ideas without falling into the trap most beginners walk into
- A practical step-by-step plan for adding these tools to your workflow one at a time
- A free quiz at finder.platformproof.com that matches your existing skills to the online income method that fits your life
Tool 1: Luminar AI for Thumbnail Photos
The first tool on Alston’s list is Luminar AI. He credits YouTube creator Joshua Mayo for putting him onto it. Joshua mentioned the software in a video about how he builds his YouTube content, and Alston picked it up because it solves a specific problem he was running into: raw photos taken with a decent camera still look flat or off when you drop them directly into a thumbnail template.
Luminar AI is photo enhancement software that uses artificial intelligence to adjust your face, eyes, and overall image quality automatically. The feature Alston uses most is eye enhancement. If you have noticed that his eyes look unusually sharp and bright in his thumbnails, that is not a complex lighting rig. That is Luminar. The software gives you a slider to control eye size, brightness, and whiteness. You can also adjust face light, lip saturation, and teeth whitening, all from the same panel.
The export step is where this tool earns its place in the workflow. Once the edits are done, Alston exports the image as a PSD file. PSD is a high-resolution Photoshop format, and exporting to PSD actually improves the overall image quality compared to saving as a standard JPEG or PNG. He then takes that PSD into Affinity Photo, where he finishes building the thumbnail layout, adding text, backgrounds, and whatever graphic elements the video calls for.
Alston uses Luminar AI about five times per week, matching his output of roughly five videos per week. If you publish less frequently, the cost-per-use calculation changes, but the core reason to have it stays the same: a face that looks polished on a thumbnail gets more clicks, and Luminar automates the polishing step so you are not spending twenty minutes in a photo editor every time you need a headshot.
This is a tool that pays for itself in time even at relatively modest publishing schedules. The alternative is either spending that time manually editing photos or publishing thumbnails with flat, unenhanced images that compete less effectively against thumbnails from creators who have discovered this kind of tool.
Tool 2: Adobe Premiere Pro AI Captions
The second tool is Adobe Premiere Pro, but not for the reason most people think of when they hear that name. Alston does not mention Premiere Pro as a video editing platform in the traditional sense here. He specifically calls out the AI-powered caption transcription feature, which he uses on every video he makes for both YouTube and TikTok.
The process is simple once it is set up. After recording a video, he drops the file into Premiere Pro, opens the Text panel, and tells the software to transcribe the audio. Premiere Pro handles the transcription automatically. Once that is done, he converts the transcription into graphic captions, which are different from standard subtitle files. These graphic captions can be animated. He has them set to slide in, rotate, or drop from the top of the frame depending on the style he wants for a given video.
He learned the specific animation setup by watching tutorials on YouTube, which he recommends as the fastest path if you want to replicate this. The learning curve is low. The bigger point is what these captions do to the video’s performance once it is published.
Videos with these animated captions consistently show higher watch time and longer view duration than videos without them. On TikTok especially, a significant portion of viewers scroll with their sound off. Captions are the only thing pulling them into the content and keeping them there. The same dynamic applies on YouTube Shorts. On standard long-form YouTube videos, Alston reports that captions also drive more comments and general engagement.
He is transparent that some viewers dislike the on-screen caption style. He acknowledges that in the video and says he is skipping them for that specific video out of respect for that feedback. But the retention data is strong enough that he keeps using them everywhere else. He adds captions to every upload as a default.
This is the kind of AI tool that does not announce itself to the viewer. It just makes the video more watchable, and more watchable videos get rewarded by the algorithm on every platform that measures completion rate.
Tool 3: Content at Scale for AI-Generated Blog Posts
Content at Scale is the third tool, and it operates differently from the first two. Luminar AI and Premiere Pro’s caption feature support existing content production. Content at Scale creates content on its own, specifically long-form blog posts for your website.
At the time this video was recorded, Alston had been running Content at Scale for about three months on a separate niche blog he had not publicly disclosed. Members of his Household Affiliates community could see the blog and the posts it was producing. Everyone else was waiting on the results. He wanted real-world data before making any strong claims about whether AI-generated content could rank in Google search consistently.
The workflow inside Content at Scale is minimal on your end. You give it your niche, roughly ten target keywords, and a word count target for each post. The software writes the post, and the key claim the platform makes is that the output is undetectable as AI by content detection tools. Whether that holds up over time as Google updates its systems is still being tested.
The part that stood out to Alston was the WordPress integration. Content at Scale does not hand you a text document to copy and paste. It imports the finished post directly into your WordPress site. You can schedule publication from inside the software without touching your WordPress dashboard at all. That single feature is the one that saves the most time.
Manual blog writing, including research, drafting, formatting, and uploading, typically takes two to four hours per post depending on length and topic complexity. Content at Scale collapses that to near zero active time. You set the parameters, let it run, and the post is in your scheduling queue. It runs on a monthly subscription with no lock-in, so you can cancel any time if the test results do not justify the cost.
Alston is honest that this tool is still under evaluation. He is not claiming it works. He is saying the workflow benefit is already real and the ranking test is ongoing. That kind of transparency is worth paying attention to when you are evaluating whether a tool belongs in your own setup.
Tool 4: Descript for Turning YouTube Videos Into Blog Posts
Descript is the fourth tool on Alston’s list, and it solves a content distribution problem rather than a content creation problem. The question it answers is: how do you get more value out of a video you already made?
The answer Descript gives is transcription. Alston records a video, drags and drops the video file into Descript, and lets the software transcribe everything he said. The transcript comes back with timestamps. There will be errors in the transcription, and he mentions that you can go through and fix them if you want, but you can also leave them as-is if your goal is SEO coverage rather than a clean reading experience.
Once he has the transcript, the blog post process takes minutes. He opens a new post in WordPress, pastes the YouTube video URL at the top to embed the video, then pastes the full transcript below it. That is the entire setup. The blog post is live with minimal formatting needed.
Why does this matter for a YouTube creator? Two reasons. First, Google cannot watch a video. It reads text. A blog post with the full transcript gives Google a large text document full of naturally used keywords and phrases, which creates ranking opportunities that the video alone cannot generate. When someone searches for a phrase Alston happened to say on camera, the blog post can surface in search results even if the YouTube video would not.
Second, the blog post creates a second place for monetization. Before the transcript starts, Alston places his affiliate links and links to his own products. People who arrive at the blog from search see those links immediately, before they even start reading. That means one recording session can produce income from two different channels: the YouTube video through ad revenue and affiliate links in the description, and the blog post through search traffic and the links placed at the top of the page.
Alston uses Descript roughly once a month, typically batching several transcriptions in one sitting when he remembers to do it. It is a monthly subscription, but he points out that the alternative is paying a human to transcribe your videos, which is more expensive at anything close to regular publishing volume. The software also handles formatting and exports text cleanly, which speeds up the copy-paste step into WordPress.
Tool 5: ChatGPT for Ideas and Creative Direction
The fifth tool is ChatGPT, and the way Alston uses it is significantly different from how most people approach it. He is upfront that he thinks the common approach is a mistake, and he explains why in concrete terms.
He does not use ChatGPT to write content. He does not type a topic into a prompt box and publish whatever comes back. His argument against that approach is practical: the output is not always accurate, a large number of creators are feeding the same types of prompts to the same model, and when everyone does that, the results start sounding identical. You end up producing content that is indistinguishable from dozens of other creators targeting the same audience with the same tool. That kills what makes your content worth watching in the first place.
What he actually uses ChatGPT for is variation and outline generation. Here is the specific example he walks through in the video. He wants to create multiple Pinterest pins for the same YouTube video, and he needs ten different headline angles to test. Writing ten variations of a title manually takes real time and creative energy. Instead, he types something like “create 10 variations of Pinterest pin title: make 100 per day with YouTube” and gets usable options in under a minute. He picks the ones that match his audience and moves on to the next task.
For video and content outlines, he uses a similar approach. Before sitting down to script a new video, he might type “give me an outline for affiliate marketing on Pinterest” and use the structure ChatGPT returns as a scaffold to build from. He is not publishing the outline. He is using it to organize his own thinking faster than he would if he started from a blank document.
The technique he specifically recommends for better results is to prime the model with a role before making your actual request. He calls this calibrating ChatGPT. Before asking for Pinterest pin titles, he first types something like “act as an expert in Pinterest marketing” and sends that message. Then he makes his real request. He showed examples side by side in the video, and the responses after the role-setting prompt were more specific and more useful than the responses without it.
The mental model he wants viewers to take away is clear: use ChatGPT where you personally lack speed or creativity, not as a substitute for knowing your subject. If you cannot tell whether what ChatGPT writes about your niche is accurate or not, you are not yet in a position to publish in that niche, with or without AI help. The tool amplifies what you already bring to the table. It does not replace the need to bring something.
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How to Add These Tools to Your Workflow Without Getting Overwhelmed
One of the easiest mistakes to make after watching a video like this is to try to adopt all five tools at once. That approach almost always ends in none of them actually getting used. Here is a more practical sequence based on what Alston described about how he actually uses each tool.
- Start with ChatGPT because there is no cost and no setup. Use it this week to generate ten title variations for one piece of content you are already planning. Get comfortable with the role-priming technique before you ask it anything complicated.
- Add Luminar AI if you publish visual content with your face in it. This tool pays off fast when thumbnails directly affect click-through rate, which is one of the most visible metrics on YouTube.
- Set up Premiere Pro captions once and apply the template to every future video. The setup is front-loaded. After the initial learning curve from a few tutorials, captions become an automatic step in your export checklist.
- Add Descript once you have at least five to ten existing videos that have not been turned into blog posts yet. Batch the transcriptions in a single session to get the most out of the monthly cost.
- Evaluate Content at Scale only after you have a WordPress blog up and running and you understand your target keywords well enough to give the tool meaningful inputs. The output is only as good as the parameters you set.
The common thread across all five tools is that they save time on tasks that are repetitive, manual, and not where your creative energy belongs. That is the real reason Alston uses them. Not because AI is impressive, but because every hour saved on photo editing, captioning, transcription, and brainstorming is an hour he can put back into recording, publishing, and building the audience that makes the income possible.
Find Your X
These five tools make more sense once you know what kind of online business you are actually building. If you are still figuring that out, the Platform Proof Finder at finder.platformproof.com asks you six questions about your current skills, time availability, and income goals and returns the method that fits your situation. Free to use, takes about two minutes, and gives you a clearer starting point than most people get from hours of YouTube research.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Luminar AI the same as Luminar Neo?
No. Luminar AI and Luminar Neo are separate products from the same company, Skylum. Luminar AI was the earlier release focused on portrait and landscape enhancements. Luminar Neo is the newer platform with an expanded set of editing tools. Alston specifically mentions Luminar AI in this video. If you go to the Skylum website today, you will likely see Luminar Neo featured more prominently, but the core portrait and eye enhancement features Alston describes are present in both versions.
Do you need Adobe Premiere Pro specifically for AI captions, or will another editor work?
Other video editors do offer caption and transcription features. CapCut, DaVinci Resolve, and Descript itself all have auto-caption tools. Alston uses Premiere Pro because it is already his primary editing software, so adding captions does not require switching tools. If you already use a different editor, check whether it has a built-in transcription or auto-caption feature before paying for a separate subscription.
How much does Content at Scale cost?
Content at Scale uses a subscription model with pricing tiers based on how many posts you generate per month. Alston does not state the specific dollar amount in this video. For current pricing, check their official website directly. He does mention it is a monthly recurring charge and that he can cancel any time, which suggests there is no annual lock-in at the tier he is using.
Does Descript replace a human transcription service?
For most purposes in a content business, yes. Descript’s transcription accuracy is good enough for creating blog posts and repurposing content. Alston notes there will be some errors in the output, but for SEO purposes, a few transcription errors in a long blog post are generally not a problem. If you need a verbatim, publication-quality transcript for legal, medical, or accessibility purposes, a professional human transcription service is still the safer option.
Can you use ChatGPT to write a complete YouTube script?
Alston’s direct answer to this in the video is no, and he explains the reasoning. ChatGPT can generate a plausible-sounding script on almost any topic, but the output will often contain inaccuracies, and the style will overlap heavily with what other creators in your niche are producing through the same tool. He recommends using it for outlines, title variations, and brainstorming, then writing the actual script yourself based on your own knowledge and experience in the niche.
How do you “calibrate” ChatGPT with a role before asking questions?
The technique Alston demonstrates is to send a short framing message before your actual question. He types something like “act as an expert in Pinterest marketing” as a standalone message first, then follows up with his real prompt. The model incorporates that framing into its responses and tends to produce more specific, practical output as a result. You can adapt the framing to whatever domain you work in. “Act as an expert in affiliate marketing,” “act as an expert in email list building,” and similar prompts all work the same way.
Does adding a transcript blog post hurt your SEO by creating duplicate content?
A transcript posted on your own blog is not duplicate content in the SEO sense. Duplicate content issues arise when the same text appears on multiple different domains or URLs that compete with each other. A transcript on your blog is unique content on your domain. The fact that you also said those words in a YouTube video does not create a duplicate content conflict, because YouTube and your blog are separate domains and Google indexes them independently.
What if you only have time to use one of these five tools right now?
ChatGPT is the most accessible starting point because it requires no setup, has a free tier, and can be applied to whatever type of content you are already creating. If you are a video creator with a face-forward thumbnail strategy, Luminar AI would likely give you the most visible return on investment, because thumbnail click-through rate is one of the highest-impact variables you can optimize on YouTube. Pick the tool that addresses the bottleneck you are actually hitting right now, not the one that sounds most impressive in a list.
Read Next
Alston covers ChatGPT extensively in this video as a brainstorming and ideation tool. If you want to go deeper on what ChatGPT is capable of, including some features most casual users have never touched, the next read covers exactly that.
How to Access and Use ChatGPT Plugins: Full Walkthrough and Honest Take
Sources
- Alston Godbolt, “5 A.I. Tools To Help Me Earn 5 Figures Per Month,” YouTube, youtu.be/VY8iyFafxHs
- Luminar AI by Skylum at luminar.io
- Adobe Premiere Pro at adobe.com/products/premiere.html
- Content at Scale at contentatscale.ai
- Descript at descript.com
- ChatGPT by OpenAI at openai.com/chatgpt
Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.