I'm tired of AI project ideas that assume everyone wants to be a content creator!

Everyone tells you that you need to build things with AI to really get a good understanding of it. I totally agree with that, but the hard part is knowing where to start and what to build.

A quick search on YouTube/TikTok/Instagram will immediately bombard you with a sh@#t load of projects like; "Use AI to create a social media empire from your kitchen bench", "Create your $1M YouTube channel with a 1000 AI generated videos a week", "How I Used AI to Pump Out 50 Blog Posts Before Breakfast" and so on, to infinity and beyond. The thing is, I don't want to be an influencer or content creator. I just want some ideas to try out to learn a bit more about AI.

So why not go all Inception on this bad boy and get AI to help you generate some ideas to start building with AI? I'm sure even Leonardo DiCaprio would be proud of us for this clever use of AI in AI!

To help you get going I've created a simple prompt to generate some ideas. I've purposely left some spaces so you can add that personal touch to get back something customised just for you.

I want to learn AI tools by actually building things, not just reading about them. That could be a simple automation, a scheduled task, a saved prompt/workflow I reuse, or a small app. Give me a shortlist of things I could realistically build this week.

About me:

- Hobbies/interests: [list a few things you're into — sport, cooking, music, reading, gardening, whatever]
- Job/industry: [what you do for work, or the field you're in]
- Tool I'm using: [Claude Cowork, Codex, Gemini, Claude Code, etc.]
- Time I've got: [a couple of hours / a weekend / ongoing tinkering]
- Comfort level with code: [none / a bit / comfortable]

Based on that, suggest a mix of ideas grouped by difficulty — not just apps. Include things like automations, scheduled tasks, reusable prompts, or small tools where they fit better than a full build.

**Beginner** — something I could get working in under an hour
**Intermediate** — something with a bit more setup that does something genuinely useful for me on an ongoing basis
**Advanced** — something more ambitious that would stretch what I know

For each idea, give me:

1. What it does, what type of thing it is (automation, scheduled task, prompt, or app), and why it's useful to someone with my interests/job (not generic)
2. Roughly how long it'd take
3. What I'd learn from building it

Skip anything to do with social media content, video editing, or content creation tools unless that's directly relevant to what I told you above.

I would highly recommend you pay for a subscription as part of this process. Even just for a month. The results you get from a paid version of the model is generally better than the free versions. As well as that in order to use tools like Claude Cowork or Codex, which will totally make this process way more fun and achievable, you need to pay for a basic subscription.

Now off you go and have fun with this!

Let me know how you get on, or better yet, share it with someone you know or a family member. I firmly believe technology, and AI in particular, can be a great leveller, but only if you see people around you using it. Seeing a peer do something makes you believe you can do it too, and that takes away a lot of the fear or the feeling that you're not good enough to try. Learning is best done when you're having fun, trying something different, hitting a wall a few times, and nutting it out until you've made something you're proud of.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn.