There are a thousand videos out there telling you that AI is going to make you rich. Drop a prompt in ChatGPT, paste the output somewhere, collect a check. Alston sat down by the lake one morning, 90 degrees before 11 a.m., and decided to tell you what most of those videos will never say: AI will only make you money if you already have a skill or you are willing to build one.
That is not a pessimistic take. That is the actual operating truth of how this works. Alston has made real money with AI. He will show you exactly what that looked like, what skills were underneath it, and why the same AI tools that helped him will frustrate you if you skip the foundation. This post walks through every point from that video, unfiltered.
What You’ll Walk Out With
- The single formula Alston uses to find any money-making opportunity online
- A real example of Alston using MidJourney and Ahrefs to sell tattoo designs on Etsy
- Why AI exposes your skill gaps instead of filling them
- The exact ways Alston uses AI every day in his content business
- Why buyer keywords matter more than high-traffic keywords, and why ChatGPT alone cannot tell you which is which
- Why relying on YouTube ad revenue alone is a weak business strategy
- The baseball analogy that will change how hard you try to force things online
- How to figure out which skill you should build first using finder.platformproof.com
The Formula That Actually Works
Alston opened the video with something that sounds too simple until you actually think about it. Making money online is just finding a problem and then either creating a solution or finding one that already exists. Once you have the solution, you create content to attract people to it.
He used his own gimbal as a live example. He wanted to create content on the go. His big camera was bulky and he dropped it. The solution was the DJI Osmo 3. But buying the DJI Osmo 3 created a new problem: carrying it around in multiple pieces without losing anything. The solution to that was a Harding case for about 20 to 30 dollars.
Every solution creates a new problem. That cycle of problem and solution is an infinite stream of opportunity. Someone out there is frustrated right now about something you already know how to fix. The money is in that gap between what they need and what they can find. AI is a tool that can help you get your solution in front of those people faster and more efficiently. But it cannot tell you what the solution should be if you do not already understand the problem.
How Alston Made Real Money on Etsy with AI
Alston did not just theorize about this. He walked through an actual example from his own Etsy account. Here is exactly what he did.
He watched a video by Marcus Campbell, the affiliate marketing dude, who talked about creating tattoo designs and selling them on Etsy. Alston took that idea and built a process around it using AI at every step.
First, he used Ahrefs, a paid keyword research tool, to find the specific tattoo keywords people were searching for. He was not guessing. He was finding actual search demand. A samurai tattoo design was one that recently sold, which is why it came to mind during the video.
Second, he took those keywords into MidJourney and generated the actual tattoo designs. He was deliberate about the prompt: he specified a white background so the images would be ready for practical use. He downloaded the designs from MidJourney.
Third, he brought those images into Canva and prepared them as PNG and PSD files. The PSD format specifically mattered because tattoo buyers often use Procreate to apply and customize designs. He was thinking about what the buyer actually needed after the purchase.
Notice what is in that story. Keyword research skills. Product format knowledge. Understanding of what Procreate users need. Understanding of how Etsy buyers think. AI handled the image generation and reduced the time and cost of production to nearly zero. But the business knowledge is what turned it into a sale. Strip out the business knowledge and the AI output would just be a folder of random images sitting on a hard drive going nowhere.
The Core Truth: AI Enhances, It Does Not Replace
This is the part of the video that Alston kept returning to, and it is worth stating plainly. AI will enhance whatever you already know how to do. That is it. That is the whole thing.
If you know how to find traffic, AI will help you find more of it faster. If you know how to write content that converts, AI will help you produce more of it. If you understand what your audience actually wants, AI will help you give it to them at scale.
But the flip side is just as true: AI is going to expose what you do not know how to do. People who jump into AI tools with no underlying skills end up making more bad content faster. They pump out faceless YouTube videos or VO3-generated clips and wonder why nothing is happening. The answer is that they were already missing the skill. AI just made the missing skill more visible by removing every other excuse.
AI has been around for a long time. Ahrefs uses AI-driven data. Fiverr gigs selling keyword lists existed five or ten years ago. None of those tools helped the people who did not know what to do with the output. A list of low-competition keywords means nothing to someone who does not understand buyer intent, audience fit, or how to build a funnel around traffic. The same is true today with more capable tools. The gap is not the tool. The gap is the knowledge behind how to use it.
What Alston Actually Uses AI For Every Day
Alston did not just make a philosophical argument. He shared the specific ways he uses AI in his own workflow right now.
He uses AI to come up with script ideas and bullet points for YouTube scripts and TikTok scripts. When he is staring at a blank page trying to figure out what to cover, AI shortens that process significantly.
He uses AI to write scripts for faceless YouTube channels. This is one of the most common applications people talk about, and Alston does it too. But he is clear that the human element of understanding what a viewer wants, and understanding why a particular video actually went viral, does not get automated. That judgment call is still his job.
He uses AI to write blog posts. If you are reading this, you know the format. AI can generate a starting point, but the framing, the angle, the understanding of why a reader landed here, that comes from knowing the audience.
He uses AI to help with content creation and thumbnail ideas. Not to hand over creative control, but to move faster through the part of the process that does not require deep judgment.
The pattern in all of these is consistent: AI is handling the production load. Alston is handling the strategy and the human understanding. You need both sides for the output to work.
Why Keywords Alone Won’t Pay Your Bills
One of the sharper points in the video was about keyword research. You can go into ChatGPT right now and ask for a list of high-traffic, low-competition keywords. It will give you one. That list might even be accurate.
But if you do not know the difference between an informational keyword and a buyer keyword, that list is essentially useless. You can rank for a term that gets thousands of searches per month and generate zero dollars from it because every single person who searched that phrase was looking for free information, not a product, a service, or a recommendation.
Buyer keywords are the phrases people type when they are already in a decision-making mindset. They are looking for comparisons, reviews, or specific solutions. Informational keywords bring people who want to learn. Both have value, but the path to revenue is different, and AI does not automatically know which type of keyword fits your specific audience and monetization model.
Alston mentioned this in the context of targeting the right keywords as a beginner being really important. The AI can give you a spreadsheet. Understanding what to do with it requires knowing your niche, your buyer, and your funnel.
The Revenue-Stream Gap Most Beginners Ignore
Alston made a direct statement in the video: relying just on YouTube to pay you is a very weak business strategy. The YouTube Partner Program exists, and TikTok has its Creator Rewards Program, but the math on those alone is brutal.
At the TikTok creativity fund rate he referenced, 2 cents per 1,000 views, you would need millions of consistent views just to generate meaningful monthly income. And consistently going viral is not a strategy. The right video at the right time with the right topic has to land in a way you cannot reliably engineer. It is, as Alston put it, a crapshoot.
What Alston recommends instead is having a plan that includes multiple revenue streams. He named affiliate marketing, digital products, physical products, and memberships. These are the ways you convert the audience you build, whether on YouTube, TikTok, or through search, into income that is not dependent on algorithmic luck.
A dog video walking down the street can get a million views and generate almost nothing unless there is a product, a recommendation, or a service attached to it. The content creates the audience. The business model converts the audience. AI can help you create more content faster. It cannot build the business model for you.
Not sure which skill you should build first?
Answer a few quick questions and get a personalized starting point at finder.platformproof.com.
The Skill Gap Nobody Wants to Talk About
Alston did not dance around this. One of the biggest reasons people fail with AI is that they are not willing to learn a skill. Not unable. Not blocked by some external circumstance. Not willing.
There is a version of the online money story that has been running for years now. It says: find the right tool, follow these steps, make money. First it was blogs. Then it was Facebook ads. Then it was dropshipping. Then it was print-on-demand. Now it is AI automation. Each wave convinces a new group of people that the tool itself is the shortcut past doing the work of developing expertise.
And each wave ends the same way for most of the people who try it: frustration, wasted time, and a belief that the opportunity was a lie. The opportunity was not a lie. The expectation that the tool replaces the skill was the problem.
AI has leveled the playing field. Alston acknowledged that directly. It costs almost nothing to create content now compared to what it cost five years ago. Image generation is free or cheap. Script writing is free or cheap. Distribution platforms are free. The tools are not the bottleneck anymore. The skill and the understanding of the audience is the bottleneck, same as it always was.
The Challenge: Start with YOUR Skills
Alston closed with the most practical challenge in the whole video: make a list of your skills, your knowledge, your experiences, and everything you want to be known for. Then find specific ways AI can enhance what you already know how to do.
This sounds simple. It is also the step most people skip. They see the income potential in a niche like online business or AI automation, and they jump into it without any foundational knowledge in that space. They feed prompts into AI and post the output and wonder why nobody cares. AI gave them words. It could not give them credibility, experience, or a reason for a stranger to trust their content over someone who has actually done the thing.
Alston made a point that stuck: the money is in regular everyday stuff. Teaching parents where to find the best deals on school supplies. Teaching kids how to play a sport. Teaching people how to do something you have done a thousand times without thinking about it. That knowledge, combined with AI that helps you create content around it and get found for it, is a real business.
He mentioned making a TikTok video that day about kids baseball and coach pitch. That is not a glamorous niche. It is also not saturated, and the person watching it is a real parent with a real kid who wants real guidance from someone who knows what they are talking about. That is a position worth building. AI helps you build it faster. It does not substitute for having it.
The Baseball Analogy That Changes How You Think About This
Alston coaches coach pitch and uses a comparison from that experience that applies directly to building an online business. When kids pick up a bat for the first time, they swing as hard as they can. They are trying to hit a home run. And almost every time, they miss. The harder they swing, the more they miss.
The fix is not to swing harder. The fix is to let the bat do the work. When you stop trying to force the contact and just put the bat in the right position, the ball goes where you want it to go.
Online business works the same way. When you are desperate for a result, you overswing. You chase every new tool. You post every day with no strategy. You try to force virality. You pump out AI content hoping volume alone will produce income. Every swing is maximum effort and minimum contact.
When you stop overswinging and start putting the bat in the right position, things go where you want. The bat is your skill. AI helps you swing it more often and with less friction. But you still have to have the bat, and you still have to put it in the right position. That is the part nobody can do for you.
Honest Drawbacks
The argument Alston makes is solid, but there are real friction points worth naming honestly.
Building a skill takes time. If you are starting from scratch, the gap between where you are and where AI can meaningfully amplify your output is measured in months, not days. That is real, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling the shortcut they just described as the problem.
The Etsy tattoo example worked partly because Alston was already familiar with keyword research and digital product delivery. That knowledge did not come from a single video. It came from paying attention to how online businesses work over a period of time. The AI dramatically sped up the production side. It did not teach him the business model from scratch.
There is also a discovery problem. If you are sitting with a skill you are not sure is monetizable, or you do not know how to connect it to an audience, that uncertainty is real and AI cannot solve it directly. You still need a process for figuring out which of your skills has a paying audience and what that audience actually needs.
The revenue-stream complexity is also real. Affiliate marketing, digital products, physical products, memberships, that is not one decision. It is four different business models with different learning curves, different platforms, and different customer relationships. You cannot pursue all of them at once and do any of them well. You have to pick an entry point and build from there.
Find Your X
If the main takeaway from this video is that you need to start with your own skills, the most useful next step is figuring out which skill is the right starting point for you specifically. That depends on what you already know, what kind of work you want to do, and what audience you are trying to serve.
The Platform Proof Finder tool walks you through exactly that. Answer a few questions about what you know, how you want to work, and what your goals are, and it maps you to the most practical starting point. No guessing. No random niche selection. Just a clear direction based on what you already have. Start at finder.platformproof.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you really make money with AI if you have no skills right now?
Yes, but the path runs through skill-building first. AI makes the production side of any skill cheaper and faster. Someone with no existing skills can start learning one now and use AI to accelerate the growth. The honest answer is that the skill development timeline is still months, not hours, regardless of the AI tools available.
What skills transfer best to AI-enhanced online income?
Any skill that involves explaining, demonstrating, or solving a specific problem transfers well. Cooking, fitness, finance basics, home repair, parenting strategies, local sports coaching, crafts, trade skills, anything with a clear process and a clear audience works. The more specific your knowledge, the easier it is to find the exact people who want it.
Is a faceless YouTube channel a viable strategy with AI?
It can be, but only if the person running it understands what makes a video actually perform for that audience. AI can write the script and generate the visuals. It cannot decide what angle will make someone watch for eight minutes instead of eight seconds. That judgment requires real knowledge of the niche and the viewer.
How much does Ahrefs cost and do you need it?
Ahrefs plans start at around $129 per month for the Lite tier as of mid-2025. It is a professional tool and genuinely useful for keyword research, but beginners can start with free alternatives like Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest while they are learning the basics. The tool matters less than understanding what to look for in the data it gives you.
What is MidJourney and how does it fit into a real business?
MidJourney is an AI image generation tool accessible through Discord. It is capable of producing detailed, professional-quality images from text descriptions. In the Etsy tattoo example, it replaced what would have been a significant design cost. The business fit is as a production tool, not a strategy tool. You still need to know what to create, who wants it, and how to deliver it in a format they can actually use.
Why does the TikTok Creator Rewards Program pay so little?
The rates on platform ad programs are set by the platforms and reflect the value advertisers place on the specific audience watching a given video. Entertainment content and viral videos often have broad, unfocused audiences that advertisers pay less to reach. Niche content with a defined buyer audience commands higher rates. The underlying business lesson is that platform payouts alone are not a stable income source, and a direct monetization path through products or affiliate offers pays far more per view.
What is affiliate marketing and is it a good starting point?
Affiliate marketing means earning a commission when someone you refer buys a product or service through your link. It is a reasonable starting point for many people because it requires no product creation and no customer service. The skill required is understanding how to match the right product to the right audience and create content that earns trust before making a recommendation. Amazon Associates, ShareASale, and individual company programs are common starting points.
How do you know when you have enough skill to start using AI to scale?
A practical signal is when you can consistently explain your topic clearly without relying on AI to tell you what to say. If you need AI to tell you what the audience cares about, you are not there yet. Once you know the audience, understand the common questions, and have a point of view on how to solve their problems, AI becomes a production tool that multiplies your output rather than a crutch filling the gap where knowledge should be.
Read Next
The patterns Alston described in this video, overestimating tools, underestimating skill, chasing shortcuts instead of building a foundation, show up in nearly every story about why someone tried to make money online and quit. If you want the full picture on where the breakdown usually happens, this covers it directly.
Why 99% Fail to Make Money Online (Avoid These Mistakes)
Sources
- Alston Godbolt, “The Brutal Truth About Making Money Online with AI Must Watch!”: YouTube, channel Platform Proof
- Marcus Campbell, Affiliate Marketing Dude: YouTube channel referenced by Alston as the original source of the Etsy tattoo design idea
- MidJourney: AI image generation platform used for tattoo design creation (midjourney.com)
- Ahrefs: keyword research and SEO tool referenced for identifying tattoo design search volume (ahrefs.com)
- Canva: design tool used for formatting and exporting final product files (canva.com)
- Procreate: iPad illustration app referenced as the target use environment for tattoo design buyers (procreate.art)
- TikTok Creator Rewards Program: referenced rate of approximately 2 cents per 1,000 views for standard content
Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.