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You write a careful article for your clients. Most of them skim it. The ones who'd gain most from it, busy owners who'd rather look than read, miss the point entirely.
The usual answer is a chart. But as I said while we built this: "The only thing people read worse than words is graphs."
So I spent a day teaching an AI to draw something else: small animated scenes, like a puppet show, one under each heading. Three questions came up. What should a picture show? Which AI setup is worth paying for? And why does the cheap one skip the work?
The first figure it drew for a post was a bar chart. I called it undercooked. It was correct, and nobody would look at it twice.
The next ones were better drawn but had a quieter problem. They showed what the post said, never why it mattered to the reader. So we split the job in two. One step draws what happened. A second step won't start until the first is done, and it asks who the point lands on and how they should feel about it.
The figure that worked showed a person standing at a sieve: drafts poured in, most were caught, a few fell through. You see the idea before you read a word.
You can run these tools with a premium team of AI models or a cheap one. We tested both on the same post.
The premium team cost $8.23 and took 53 minutes. The cheap team cost $1.34 and took 38. The premium figures were a little more artistic. For eight times the money, a little isn't enough. The cheap team is the one to run, for me and for most small businesses.
A whole post costs about $2 and 20 minutes with the team I can afford. You lose very little trying it, and you may stop losing the skimmers.
Then we tried the cheapest model on its own. It finished in three minutes for $0.36, and its report said plainly that it had skipped the review and the helpers.
The figures were well designed, but four of the five didn't move. Asking it nicely to follow the process didn't work. Making the process a hard rule did: it can't finish until every figure is built and checked. On the next run, all six figures animated.
Everything is free to copy: the tool, the rules and a ledger of every run, at github.com/mackenziebowes/jacquard.
If you'd like your own articles to explain themselves in pictures, write to me: mackenzie@mackenziebowes.com or @_mackenziebowes.
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