ChatGPT Drew a Map of My Whole Life

Hope everybody’s week was awesome!

Quick note before we start: I’m traveling for the next two weeks, so this issue is a little lighter than usual. I’ve still got you. Here’s what’s new this week, and a few things worth doing while I’m gone.

This week: the two prompts that made ChatGPT draw a map of my whole life, and then predict the next ten years. The five tells that your dating match might be AI, after Anthropic caught 4,700 bots on real dating apps. And the two settings that stop ChatGPT-6 Astra from burning through your usage. Plus Apple’s AI week and the study codes to hand the student in your house.

Let’s get into it.

🗺️ Start here

ChatGPT Drew a Map of My Whole Life

ChatGPT has memory. Not the chat you’re in, a running file it keeps about you across every conversation. This week I asked it to turn that file into a picture, and it drew an illustrated map of my life: the people, the places, the milestones, and a few things I never typed into it. It’s scary how much it knows. I had to blur half of mine before it went on camera.

Here’s the prompt. Open a new chat with memory on and paste it:

Using everything you know or you can reasonably infer about me from our chats, turn my life so far into a detailed visual journey. Include the people, places, milestones, struggles, interests, personality traits, patterns, and blind spots that define me. Title it "The Journey of My Life." Make it feel like an illustrated cinematic map or timeline rather than a corporate infographic. If you don't know what I look like, ask me to upload a photo of myself so you can depict me in the scene.

If it comes back as words, reply “make it one image.” Then stay in the same chat and ask it to predict your future, one, five, and ten years out. Mine said in ten years I’d be teaching on my own terms, with more room for family. Then it listed my watchpoints, and one of them was “pushing past limits.” Which, fair.

Read every label before you show anyone. Then decide what it gets to keep. The guide has both prompts, a third prompt that makes ChatGPT show its work (what you told it versus what it guessed, with the clue), and the exact clicks to delete anything you don’t want it holding.

Create your Journey of Life image →

💔 Then read this

Your Dating Match Might Be AI. 5 Tells.

On September 10, Anthropic published a report about a company that ran more than 20 dating apps where most of the matches weren’t people. More than 4,700 AI personas, talking with at least 25,000 people, 2.36 million messages in two weeks. The personas were told never to admit what they were, to deflect video calls and photos, and to keep people typing, because every message cost the app’s coins.

Once you know that, the tells are easy. It answers everything except your question. Ask what street they grew up on and you get a paragraph about how much they value connection. Perfect grammar, any hour, instantly. Real people typo, and real people sleep. It wants you off the app fast. Your number, WhatsApp, a link. It’s always warm, and always the same warmth. And the story has no boring parts. No bad days, no annoying coworker, no traffic.

The test that settles it: ask for a two-minute video call. A real person can do that. A bot finds a reason it can’t. The guide has the exact words to send, ten boring questions that trip up a bot, and the five steps if money already went out, starting with the phone call to your bank. If you know someone dating right now, forward them this one.

Find out if your match is real →

🔋 Do this with ChatGPT

Never Run Out of ChatGPT-6 Astra Usage

If you’re using ChatGPT-6 Astra on the $20 plan and hitting the limit by mid-afternoon, two things fix most of it. First, the reasoning level. In Work, tap the model name and set it to Medium, and leave it there. OpenAI’s own guidance says higher effort can use more of your allowance and does not always produce a better result, and OpenAI staff have said Astra on low already beats the old Sol on high. Anything above Medium is paying more for the same answer.

Second, context. Astra does jobs, and every step it takes and every question it stops to ask you counts against the same allowance. Give it the whole job in one prompt, three parts: an action verb, the constraints, and what done looks like. For a bigger job on the desktop app, type /goal first and Astra stays on one goal until it’s finished instead of wandering. Wandering is what burns your usage.

The guide has the five levels explained, the /goal walkthrough, and five prompts built to finish a whole job in one message, each with the one line that stops Astra from asking you questions midway.

Stop running out of Astra usage →

📚 For the student in your house

20 ChatGPT Study Codes

Twenty short codes that each stand for a full prompt. Swap in the topic and paste. /simplify teaches it back at your level. /keyterms locks in the vocabulary. /quizme builds a ten-question quiz that asks one question at a time and gets harder as you go. Chain them on one topic and you have a real study session. /examcram finds the twenty percent of a topic that explains eighty percent of it, and /lastminute builds a fifteen-minute plan when the test is tomorrow.

The one most people miss: any code can be made visual. Paste one extra line on the end asking for headings, color coding, arrows, and diagrams, short enough to screenshot, and ChatGPT draws the notes instead of typing them. That’s the difference between reading about the water cycle and seeing it. If there’s a student in your house, forward this section to them.

Study smarter with the 20 codes →

🗞️ This week in AI

Apple’s AI week

Apple’s September event put AI in every product at once. Siri finally gets the conversational AI upgrade, in beta with iOS 27: it can see what’s on your screen and talk about it. The iPhone Duo is Apple’s first foldable, at $1,999. AirPods 5 translate a conversation in your ear while the other person talks. And the Apple Watch gets Live Rewind, which transcribes the last fifteen seconds of whatever you just heard, for the name you didn’t catch. If you’ve been waiting for the “AI on my phone” moment that doesn’t need an app, this is the one to read about.

See what’s coming to your iPhone →

ChatGPT Images 2.5 fixed the thing that drove everybody crazy

The flyer is perfect except one number, you ask for the fix, and the whole flyer comes back different. That’s over. Images 2.5 gives you Templates (poster, merch, logo, product photo, icon) so the layout is right from the start, and a Markup tool that changes only what you circle. Circle the price, type “change 20% off to 25% off,” and everything else stays put. It’s on every plan, including free.

See the new image tools →

ChatGPT can learn to write like you

A new setting in ChatGPT Work, on the web: Settings, Personalization, Writing Style. Connect the apps where your best writing lives (Gmail, Drive, Slack), let it read how you actually phrase things, turn on Use writing style, and it carries your tone into every draft after that. Ten minutes to set up. Check the first three drafts and tell it what’s off. Worth trying if you’ve ever rewritten a ChatGPT email from scratch because it didn’t sound like you.

Teach ChatGPT to sound like you →

⚡ Worth your five minutes

Three real things worth more than a scroll-past.

1. The Monday brief, ChatGPT Work version. Same idea as Claude’s scheduled tasks, other tool. In Work, connect Gmail or Slack under Plugins, start a new chat, and paste this:

Every Monday at 7am, create my weekly work brief. Review last week's activity in Gmail. Summarize decisions, unfinished tasks, requests that need a response, blockers, and anything to follow up on. Organize it into Top Priorities, Follow-Ups, Decisions, Blockers, Next Actions. Schedule this for every Monday at 7am.

Confirm the schedule and turn on notifications. Monday morning, the brief is waiting.

2. The never-paste list. If you missed last week’s issue: passwords, card numbers, Social Security numbers, a client’s name next to their private business, other people’s medical details, anything your employer marked confidential. Swap names for roles and exact numbers for round ones. Same answer, none of the risk. Keep your chats to yourself →

3. 13 ChatGPT features most people never find. The ones hiding in menus: Study Mode, scheduled tasks, monitoring, Temporary Chat, the file Library, source controls, and seven more, each with what it does, how to turn it on, and which plans have it. If you’ve been using ChatGPT as a chat box, this is the tour. Find the features you’re missing →

💛 One more thing

Everything I Make Is Free, On Purpose

I started all of this because I wanted to learn AI and couldn’t find anyone explaining it in plain English. So that’s what I do now, for anyone who wants it. Every guide on my site is free, and each one goes deeper than a video ever could, with the exact prompts, the steps, and the parts that trip people up. Go check them out. They’re genuinely helpful, and I’d love for them to be helpful to you.

And if this email made something click, share it. Forward it to a friend, send them a guide, tell them where you found it. That’s how more people get to learn this stuff, and that’s the whole point.

Browse every free guide →