L-01: Words First, Then a Brand

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This block's on the house.

Block one of the GPT class — read it, run the lab (worksheet W-01 is free too), keep what you build. The rest of the course opens with a seat: the October calendar has the dates — call 209.672.0033 to hold yours.

Goal

What exists when this block ends.

You can explain the five words that matter without notes. Your brand exists as three marks plus a written color set. And your business has a working HTML5 shell — a folder with one file, index.html, that opens in a browser and navigates clean.

Hour one

Break it on purpose.

Don’t read about the machine — go make it show you. Open chatgpt.com (free account, no card, five minutes) and run these. Every vocabulary word this class uses is something you’re about to see happen with your own eyes.

Type “write something about my business.”

Vague in, vague out — read what it gives you. Now type your real work order: business name, your town, what you sell, who it’s for. Watch the difference. That instruction you just improved? That’s a prompt — a work order, not a magic spell.

Open a brand-new chat. Ask it “what town is my shop in?”

It doesn’t know. It can’t. It can only see this conversation, right now — nothing else exists to it. What it can see is its context, and your head isn’t in it.

Ask it something it can’t possibly know — what the Oakdale paper said about a flood in 1955, a phone number for a made-up business.

Watch it answer with full confidence anyway. It picks what looks most likely, not what’s checked — it’s guessing with no awareness it’s wrong. That’s a hallucination, and it never stops happening.

Keep one chat running while you work the rest of the hour.

Then ask it to repeat your first instruction. Watch it slide off. Output wandering over a long session — unnoticed, unflagged — that’s drift. Humans drift on purpose; the machine drifts without knowing. Catching it is your job.

Now the words — you just saw most of them:

Model — the system doing the work; the chat box is just its front door.

Agent — an AI that takes actions, not just answers. Classes two and three.

Prototype — a working sketch: real enough to click, cheap enough to throw away. Everything today is one.

index.html — the front door a server hands out first. Your shell’s name.

Shipped — published, live, done. The word engineers like to hear.

Hour two

Build the brand.

Most companies run three marks. You’ll make all three today so your brand works everywhere — storefront, social, browser tab.

The brand logo

The lockup — your name plus your mark. This is the one on the door and the invoice.

The stylized logo

The expressive version — the banner, the merch, the hero image.

The icon

One square, no words. The favicon up top, the icon in the app store. The blue F doesn’t need the letters F-A-C-E-B-O-O-K — that’s what an icon is for.

Then lock the system: pick your colors and write down the hex codes, and generate your first media set (hero image, background, texture) with GPT so the look is one thing everywhere.

The fine print

Who owns what the machine made?

Prove it before we talk about it. Ask GPT to draw you the Nike swoosh. Then Mickey Mouse ears. Watch what it does — it hedges, it gets close, it offers something suspiciously similar. Now ask it “is this safe to put on my sign?” and listen to it squirm. That dance is exactly why this block exists: you just built a brand with a machine doing the drawing — so whose is it? This is copyright, and it confuses everybody, so get it straight once. First: copyright is not copywriting. Copywriting is writing the ads. Copyright is owning the work.

Copyright is automatic. The moment an original work exists, the copyright exists — no filing, no © required. Owning it and registering it are different things; registration is what makes suing easy.

The AI wrinkle. In the U.S., what the machine makes entirely on its own isn’t copyrightable — there’s no human author. What IS yours: your arrangement, your edits, your choices, the direction you gave it. The tools’ terms let you use the output commercially — but usable isn’t the same as protected. A competitor can legally reuse a purely AI-drawn image.

What gets you a letter. The machine will happily produce something too close to somebody’s existing logo or art — it doesn’t know and doesn’t care. You publish it, so the risk is yours. Eyeball your marks against a search before they go on a sign.

Copyright ≠ trademark. Your logo can be 100% original and still step on somebody’s registered mark. Copyright covers the art; trademark covers what it identifies. Different law, different office.

Rule of thumb for the toolbox: keep your prompts, your edits, and your source files — that trail is your authorship. The machine’s part is a power tool; your part is the work.

Hour three

The site brief.

We are building a website — not a platform. No logins, no dashboards yet. A site tells people who you are, where you are, what you sell, and why they should care. Open worksheet W-01 now and fill the brief as we go — this is a gather, not a talk:

The industry — what kind of business is this?

The location — address, hours, phone, the town it serves.

What people like about it — reviews, reputation, the thing customers actually say.

The deals — what’s on offer right now that belongs on the front page.

Hour four

Build the shell. Test it.

Inside GPT, build your site as a single HTML5 file — brand, colors, your brief content, real navigation. Download it. That file is a folder-ready website: drop it on a web server as index.html and www.whatever-you-are.com is live. (We do the server part together in the next class — today it opens from your own machine.)

Keep it: paste it into My work in your portal, or save it to your own Drive — your seat keeps it either way. Want a head start instead of a blank page? The portal's template shelf has starter files you pull and chop — same move as pulling any page off the site, except these are made for it.

Navigate it. Click every link. Can you get everywhere? Do you get stuck on any page? A dead end is a visitor lost.

Then use GPT the way it’s actually powerful. Ask it: how does this compare to my competitors? What do their sites do that mine doesn’t? Research is part of the build, not a separate task.

Lab bench

Work the bench.

Check them off as you do them — it saves on this device. The clock is a suggestion, not a ruler. Stuck? Raise a hand and the desk sees it.

Type "write something about my business" — mark every guess it makes. Fresh chat → "what town is my shop in?" — watch it guess. Ask it something it can’t know — catch the confident answer. Keep one chat running the rest of the hour — come back and watch it drift. Build the three marks — brand logo, stylized logo, icon. Write the three hex colors down — unwritten isn’t a brand. Run the A–D site brief, then the HTML5 shell — your file opens in a browser.

45:00

Overtime bench

Extra reps.

Finished the first bench with fuel left? Run these — deeper cuts on the same material.

Shrink the icon to favicon size — if it still reads, it’s a mark; if not, redraw. Ask GPT for a tagline, then cut it in half — the edit is yours. “Compare my shell to two competitors’ sites” — write down one thing they do that yours doesn’t. Save the shell to My work in the portal — named, not pasted nowhere. In your own words: which parts of today’s brand are protected, which aren’t — write it once.

30:00

Did it work?

✓

You can define drift and hallucination in your own words — and say why they aren’t the human versions.

✓

Three marks exist, and the icon still reads at favicon size.

✓

Your colors are written down as hex codes, not vibes.

✓

You can say which parts of your AI-made brand are protected — and which aren’t — without guessing.

✓

index.html opens in a browser and every link lands somewhere.

Turn it in

Worksheet W-01.

Fill it on the page — it saves on your device as you type. Print it or email it in when the block asks.

Open worksheet W-01