🏆 My 8-year-old judged ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. The winner built him a toy.
Get the next one in your inbox:
Happy Sunday folks!
Our five weeks in Colombia are nearly done. We fly home to Ireland on Thursday, and somehow this whole issue became about that flight.
In this week's email:
🛫 Mateo asked how planes fly. I put ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude head to head and let him pick the winner
⚽ Mateo lines up beside Messi, Haaland and Bellingham in our World Cup collage (the exact prompt is inside)
📦 An honest admission about the Summer Project Pack, and a real deadline this time
🛫 Three AIs, one question, one 8-year-old judge
The above chart says ChatGPT still owns nearly half of AI. Mateo (8) disagrees. He asked me how planes actually stay up, a fair question to settle before we cross the Atlantic on Thursday, so I gave ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude the identical request:
My 8-year-old son asked me how airplanes fly. We're flying from Colombia to Ireland next week and he's really curious about it. Explain it in a way he'll really understand, and make me something visual to help, whatever you think works best.
The scoreboard above did not predict the result.
Gemini twice told us to look closely at an image it never actually made, and Mateo just found it confusing.
ChatGPT wrote me a lovely script to read aloud, but its paper experiment lost him at "hold it under your mouth".
Claude built him an interactive page with a wing he could tilt and a Take off button. He made the plane take off again and again, and then explained lift back to me.
His verdict: "I can't wait until takeoff and I bags sitting at a window! Hopefully we will be near the wing so I can take a closer look."
I wrote the whole battle up so you can run it with your own kid:
The exact prompt, what each AI produced, and the winning page your kid can fly. Screenshots of all three outputs, the three questions that make your kid the judge, and the interactive plane Claude built for Mateo, untouched and playable. It works offline too, so it survives airplane mode. Run the same battle with whatever question your kid asked you this week.
⚽ Mateo made the World Cup squad
We watched the quarter finals on Saturday, so I picked the biggest star from each of the four teams playing and made a set of polaroid-collage portraits: Messi, Haaland, Bellingham... and instead of the Switzerland player, Mateo in an Ireland jersey, mid fist pump.
The smile on his face was worth far more than the 20 minutes it took. He is now quietly confident Ireland will make a World Cup when he is old enough to play in it 😅.
The how: Nano Banana 2 inside Higgsfield or via the Gemini app. Two steps.
First I gave it a front-facing photo of Mateo and asked for him in an Ireland jersey.
Then I fed that image in as the reference face with this prompt:
Hyperrealistic 8K photograph of a human figure composed of instant photographic prints layered on a dark, distressed, slate-textured, modern minimalist background. The figure, displaying the reference face, is meticulously assembled from approximately 20 separate photographs. Two hands reach out to adjust the photos; one hand pinches the corner of a print, revealing a subtle ring. Cinematic studio lighting, soft shadows, and 3D depth. Cool and warm color palette, muted and desaturated. Medium shot, eye level, natural proportions. 3:4 dimension.
One honest note: the newer Nano Banana Pro gave me worse results than Nano Banana 2, so don't assume you need the fancy model.
This is not limited to football. Swap in your kid and their team or sport, that is the whole trick.
📦 The honest bit about the Project Pack
Last Sunday I put the 'Summer AI Project Pack' out at $12 and said the price would jump to $19 on Wednesday. Then the last stretch here in Colombia ran away from me, I never sent the reminders, and I never changed the price. So it is still $12, and most of you never even saw the offer.
Rather than pretend that didn't happen: $12 stays until Thursday, when we fly home. Then it goes to $19.
On what it actually is: the 20 projects come from the free walkthroughs on the site, but those were written across the last year, some on tools that have since moved on. For the pack I rebuilt them on the models I'm using now and re-tested them with the kids, so you get the current, sharper versions with every prompt ready to copy.
Plus a printable 8-week calendar, the online Prompt Vault, free updated editions, and a 30-day guarantee (reply to your receipt and I'll refund you, no fuss).
Hope the week is good wherever you are. Next Sunday's email comes to you from Ireland. If you make a World Cup collage with your kid this week, reply with it, I read every one.
And if Mateo's plane page saves you one "but HOW does it fly" question at 35,000 feet, my work here is done 😁
