During the 2023 writers strikes, stand-up comedian, AI storyteller, and the creator of the hit song “BBL Drizzy” Willonius Hatcher realized AI wasn’t going away. So he decided to put in 10,000 hours to master AI tools and use them to up-level his career.
What he learned along the way changed his life — and those same skills can grow your creativity exponentially.
WILLONIUS HATCHER: We're at a very critical point in human history where things are about to change dramatically. One of the beauties of these AI tools is you now can just be anything that you dreamt of being. You can be a DJ, you can be a chef, you can code. Are you going to be the best coder in the world? Probably not, but you can get started. As an artist, I have the power of a whole studio now right here on my laptop. I can create 3D worlds. I can create Pixar-type animations. Coming up with scripts, pitch decks, movie trailers, making music. "BBL Drizzy, BBL Drizzy." That's why I think this is the best time in the world to be a creative. It's just so much easier to make something amazing.
Salutations, everyone. My name is King Willonius. I'm a stand-up comedian, AI storyteller, and the creator of the hit song "BBL Drizzy." More recently, I was recognized by Time Magazine as one of the one hundred most influential people in AI. "I live with three comedians and two rats, so it's.." Before I started diving into AI, I was an up-and-coming stand-up comedian, aspiring TV writer. So I had a bunch of meetings set up with, like, agents and managers. Then a writer strike happened and all that kind of stopped. I realized that AI isn't going anywhere and if I don't learn these tools now, I'm going to get left behind because of how fast things are moving. I just felt that I need to put a majority of my attention into learning and building with these tools. So that's what I did. I put in my 10,000 hours making comedy music. I've generated over 30,000 images in Midjourney. When ChatGPT first came out, I was prompting eight hours a day. Every day from December 2022 to April 2023, eight hours a day on ChatGPT. There was no way to cheat that process. You have to learn and you have to be disciplined, but the rewards are so great because now you have a collaborator, you have an editor, you have a mentor, you have an assistant, all at your disposal. These tools can change your life.
Getting your mind right first before you start messing around with these tools is, you know, a very critical part in actually getting that output that you want. The same way you have to train and fine-tune AI, you have to train and fine-tune yourself. You have to fine-tune your own mind. There should be a dual fine-tuning process of the AI and one's mind. Being curious is essential to thrive in AI. In being curious, everything starts with the prompt. You're only as good as the question that you ask. Ask big questions. Ask unorthodox questions. Like, "What is King Willonius' strategy for 2025 to make a billion dollars?" And then they'll create a strategy. And I'll ask the questions. I'll be like, "Well, why did you choose this output versus something else? Or pretend that you only have three months to execute all this. What does that look like?" You end up finding like a whole new way of doing things and getting very interesting outputs.
You want to embrace the f-word, failure. That's where the feedback is. You know, as a stand-up comedian, you want to fail on stage and you get information from that. You're like, "Okay, well, what did I do wrong? Was it my body language? Was it my tone?" Same thing with AI. When it doesn't give you what you want, try to figure out, like, why is that? Failure is where you really have those breakthroughs. So, I'll iterate and iterate and just keep running a thing until I get the thing that I want, essentially. "BBL Drizzy," for example, I made about a hundred versions of "BBL Drizzy." And now they have people getting married to "BBL Drizzy." I've seen nuns dance to "BBL Drizzy." When AI kind of goes off the rails, you actually sometimes get something beautiful out of that.
Being a lifelong learner is super important when it comes to AI. If you're starting a business or you're running a business, the more you know about the startup world or VCs or marketing, nuanced terms that only marketers will probably know, will serve you better when you're using these large language models. The more you know about music theory, instruments, songwriting, the great artists that have come before us and that are still here, the better music you'll create. Any discipline in life that you choose to go into, learn as much as you can, absorb as much as you can, and then use these tools to take you to the next level.
For job seekers, it's imperative that you learn how to use these tools. It's essentially the equivalent of not knowing how to use Microsoft Office or Gmail. We're at that point now. We're in the AI revolution. Like, it's presently here and it's only going to get more advanced. So, if you're seeking employment right now, you don't know how to use a large language model, you're putting yourself at a disadvantage because your competition will know how to use it. So, if I'm hiring somebody and they don't know how to use ChatGPT, they don't know how to find AI tools. With these tools, you operate just like an army of a hundred people. And without it, it's just one person. So if I have a team of people that know how to use AI, we're like the Avengers with all maxed-out power levels or the '96 Bulls. There's just no way you could defeat us.
