Creator of TickleJar
2024
UX Design, UI Design, HTML/CSS, PHP, MySQL, Generative AI
The Project
In 2024, I elevated a side project of mine to a more polished status by launching a collection of jokes, quotes, facts and other smile-inducing content. TickleJar is an entirely solo project, so every pixel and every line of code is my own.
TickleJar is meant to be endlessly browsable, engaging for any demographic, and easy to use on mobile or desktop. The content of each page is very brief, always leading you to another piece of similar content to explore.
Generative AI
One of my goals in building TickleJar was to explore the early applications of generative AI in such a project. The images in TickleJar are generated by MidJourney. A fair amount of the code is generated with the assistance of ChatGPT. ChatGPT also helped fill in biographical details for quotes.
This experiment illustrated the strengths and weaknesses of the current generative AI tools. While it was extremely helpful, generative AI proved to be unreliable in my use cases. I needed a reasonable understanding of the code that was generated in order to put it to use, and had to work with ChatGPT to debug it on several occasions. In some of those, ChatGPT was unable to find solutions that I had to find myself. Similarly, images generated for quotes were spotty. I needed to know what the individual looked like in order to know if the generated images were acceptable. In many cases, a reasonable image took dozens of attempts.
Obviously, even as I write this, generative AI has advanced beyond the tools that were available to me at the time. But the underlying lesson remains relevant, and likely will for some time: These tools are extremely helpful to an expert, but aren't yet able to be a reliable replacement for first-hand expertise.
