AI FOR LIFE WEEKLY: How AI Helped Me Hack Disney 🏰

Issue #1 is here! Thank you again for being among the first subscribers. A quick note: The formatting/layout may change over time, but I can promise you: real AI use cases, interesting things to try, AI news you should be paying attention to (because it benefits you!), and key AI literacy takeaways that everyone needs. If certain stories or insights resonate more with you than others, I’d love the feedback!

Without further ado… AI for Life Weekly, Issue #1!

My husband and I decided, rather last minute, to swing through Orlando on our way home from a beach trip. We simply couldn’t be in Florida and skip the Disney Magic entirely! But, with a 6-month-old in tow, we knew we needed “Disney lite.” (i.e., No parks!) So we thought, why not stay at a Disney Resort for an overnight?

Well, as it turns out, booking a room a day in advance at any Disney Resort during “Spring Break” week in the States is basically 1) impossible and 2) If possible, insanely expensive.  Who knew? (Everyone.)

This is where things got interesting. I asked Claude (my current go-to AI) if there was any kind of sneaky way to visit those same resorts…without paying for a night. It found a way: book a reservation at an in-resort restaurant to get in, and park with no fee. From there, it helped me research every Hilton hotel option (gotta get those points!) within 15 minutes of our target destination (Animal Kingdom Lodge), and organized it all perfectly in a very digestible research document, so that we had our ideal hotel selected in a fraction of the time it would have taken us to find it ourselves.

And then, of course, I used it for every other question I had about taking a baby around a no-parks Disney experience. It even made me a nice, cleverly designed ‘artifact’ with our itinerary for Day 2 and a interactive ‘diaper bag’ checklist.

I’ve used AI for travel purposes for 3 years now, and I can honestly say: it makes everything much, much less stressful. From planning to logistics when you’re there, I encourage you to try AI on your next trip! (And if you need inspo, my book has an entire section on ways to do just that.)

Have you ever wondered what a room in your house would look like with an accent wall? Now you can see for yourself! Try this:

And since it’s sometimes easier to just see something in action. Here’s a link to a ChatGPT chat where I explore an accent wall in my dining room.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how being ‘good’ at using AI is no longer so much about how effectively you can prompt, but rather how effectively you can think in systems and processes, and communicate them. As we enter a new phase of AI’s evolution (agentic AI – or AI that can take actions for you), AI tools are proactively filling-in-the-blanks for you (or proactively asking you to fill in the blanks for it) far more than they did previously. What matters more now is how you provide instruction to the tool on what it is to do for you, and in what order that makes the most sense for you both to be successful. 

This year, you’ll start to see a lot more people building apps and tools with AI. You’ll maybe want to know how to build them yourself. I encourage you to start, instead of asking “What was your prompt?”, asking “What was your process?” You’ll get a lot further that way!

If you’ve been thinking about coughing up $20 to finally try out Claude Cowork or Claude Code, now is the time to do it. Anthropic recently shared that through March 27th, the usage limits of Claude will be doubled during off-peak hours. That means any paid subscription goes significantly further right now.

Fair warning: once you actually start building something, the creative flow state is real. Sleep becomes optional.

Two things can be true at once: I can love AI video capabilities and also despise the weird, uncanny AI humans hawking dubious products all over my social media feeds. If you, like me, are tired of double-taking on an Ad and going “Wait, is that a real person?” I have exciting news for you: a new New York law going into effect this June requires any commercial advertisement to disclose when 'synthetic performers' (read: AI-generated actors) are being used. And every violation will cost up to a $5,000 fine.

If you are outside of New York, I think this will most directly affect the national broadcast and print ads you see more than anything hyperlocal. Hopefully, though, companies will start to err on the side of caution (and ethics) regardless and use those disclosures generally, should similar laws appear in other states or federally.

You may remember hearing about a lawyer back in 2023 that got in a heap of trouble for citing fake cases. Or the one in 2024. Or the one two months ago. Or four days ago . (Seriously guys??)

Well, it’s finally happened to me! I recently came across my first AI hallucinated legal case, “Disney vs. RedBubble” while doing some research on examples of IP infringement. Thankfully, before deciding to just throw that example into my research, I thought “Hey interesting. Let me read more about that”, threw my search into Google, and learned, whatdyaknow, no such case existed.

It’s vitally important that everyone knows that, despite the fact that AI tools are getting ‘smarter’ and the fact that their ‘Hallucination’ rates are getting lower, that they can still get things wrong a lot of the time. May this section serve as your regular reminder to fact check!

My husband, Neil, is just about as obsessed with learning about AI as I am, and he’s started a free Substack sharing the ins and outs of what he’s been trying as a Software Engineer using AI to build software better and faster. His most recent post shares what he is trying with OpenAI’s new GPT-5.4 in Codex experience. It’s funny: I’ve moved from ChatGPT to Claude for more things lately, while my husband has just switched from ClaudeCode to OpenAI. We’re a house divided (for now, anyways.) Check out what he’s been up to here.

Thank you for reading! Please feel free to reply to this email with any feedback on issue #1—what resonated, what didn’t, and what questions you have about using AI that you’d love to see my take on. Like what you read? Forward this e-mail to a friend!

Until next time,
Celia