HAVING FUN WITH AI A Field Guide to Befriending Your Digital Overlord By Brian French | AI Consultant | Sock Loss Survivor
Let me paint you a picture. It’s 7:14 AM. You’re already late. You open your sock drawer and stare into the abyss — a graveyard of singles, orphans, and one mysteriously festive sock that you have no memory of purchasing. Forty-seven socks. Zero pairs. You buy socks in bulk every January like a sensible adult, and by March, half of them have simply… ceased to exist. Where do they go? What dark dimension swallows cotton footwear? For decades, humanity had no answer. Then came Artificial Intelligence.
So naturally, I asked AI. And that, dear reader, is where the real fun begins.
The Great Sock Investigation
I typed my burning question into Claude: “I buy dozens of socks every year. By year’s end, they’re all gone. Who is stealing my socks?”
Within seconds, I received a thoroughly researched, statistically-informed, genuinely helpful response explaining sock loss patterns, laundry machine vortex theory, the psychology of misplacement, and — my personal favorite — a suggestion that I implement a “sock accountability system” using labeled mesh laundry bags.
Reader, I wept. Not from sadness. From the pure, unhinged joy of knowing that somewhere in a data center, a vast neural network had earnestly dedicated processing power to my hosiery crisis.
But I wasn’t done. I pushed further. “Okay,” I typed, “but what if it’s NOT the laundry machine? What if it’s something more… sinister?”
The AI, bless its silicon heart, then provided me with five alternative theories including: (1) a sock-specific poltergeist, (2) interdimensional fabric slippage, (3) a neighborhood sock thief with very specific tastes, (4) my own sleepwalking, and (5) — and this is the one that keeps me up at night — “the socks were never really there to begin with.”
Philosophy. I asked about socks and got existentialism. This is AI at its finest.
What AI Is Actually Good At (Spoiler: Almost Everything)
Now, before you think I spend all my time as an AI Consultant asking robots about laundry problems (I spend maybe 30% of my time on that), let’s talk about what makes AI genuinely remarkable — and genuinely hilarious — to work with.
AI as Your Over-Enthusiastic Intern
Ask AI to write a professional email declining a meeting, and it will give you five versions ranging from “politely firm” to “warmly apologetic” to one that somehow sounds like it was written by a Victorian diplomat. You asked for one email. You received a masterclass in epistolary art. This is the AI experience.
AI as Your Personal Therapist (Who Charges Nothing)
I once asked an AI to help me figure out why I procrastinate on expense reports. Forty-five minutes later, I had a complete behavioral analysis, a color-coded scheduling system, three habit-stacking techniques, and a surprisingly moving reminder that “small progress is still progress.” I cried again. Productivity content makes me emotional. Don’t judge me.
AI as Your Creative Collaborator
This is where it gets truly wild. Tell an AI “write me a poem about quarterly earnings in the style of Shakespeare,” and it will deliver iambic pentameter featuring lines like “Hark! The revenue doth rise and fall like tides.” It is objectively terrible and objectively magnificent at the same time. I have shared this poem at three conferences. It got a standing ovation at one of them. The audience was also me.
Real Talk: The Part Where I Actually Help You
Okay, let’s get serious for exactly one paragraph. As someone who works with AI every day, I can tell you that the businesses and individuals who thrive with these tools are the ones who treat AI like a brilliant, eager, occasionally literal-minded collaborator — not a magic button or a replacement for human judgment.
Serious paragraph over. Here’s what I actually recommend doing for fun and profit:
🧦 Ask it your most absurd questions first. The sock investigation taught me more about how to interact with AI than any tutorial. Push the edges. See what it does. You’ll learn something useful every time, even if that something is “this AI takes hosiery very seriously.”
🤖 Give it a persona. Ask AI to respond as a grumpy senior accountant, or an overly enthusiastic fitness coach, or a medieval scholar analyzing your marketing strategy. The results are both useful and deeply entertaining. Bonus: it forces you to think about your prompts more carefully.
💡 Use it to argue with yourself. Ask AI to steelman the opposite of your business idea. It will find every hole in your plan with the cheerful efficiency of someone who genuinely wants you to succeed. It’s like having a devil’s advocate on staff who never gets tired or asks for a raise.
📧 Let it draft the awkward stuff. You know that email you’ve been avoiding for six weeks? The one where you have to deliver bad news, set a boundary, or follow up for the fourth time without sounding unhinged? Give it to AI. Done in 30 seconds. You can spend the remaining time thinking about where your socks went.
The Mystery Remains Unsolved
I want to be upfront: the socks are still missing. AI gave me seventeen plausible theories, a sock inventory spreadsheet template, and a heartfelt acknowledgment that “the frustration of missing socks is a universal human experience that transcends culture and geography.”
It did not find my socks.
But here’s what it did do: it made me laugh, it made me think, it solved six actual work problems while I was procrastinating on the sock investigation, and it reminded me why I fell in love with technology in the first place. Not because it’s perfect. Because it’s interesting. Because every session is a little unpredictable. Because sometimes you ask for a business plan and get a philosophy lecture, and that’s not a bug — that’s the whole beautiful, chaotic, genuinely fun experience of working with AI.
So go have fun with it. Ask it something absurd. Use it for something meaningful. Let it help you with the thing you’ve been putting off.
And if you figure out the socks thing — please, for the love of all that is holy — let me know.
Brian French is an AI Consultant who helps businesses integrate artificial intelligence into their workflows — and occasionally uses those same tools to investigate household mysteries.
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