Adam is an unlikely social influencer. Instead of taco reviews, the latest fits or dancing tutorials, he’s created and shared hundreds of hours of fishing content. The videos typically feature Adam on his kitted-out sea kayak in and around the Bay and surrounding waters. Reeling in rockfish, lingcod and halibut from his bobbing perch with an enthusiastic and informative live commentary has earned him Internet fame in a niche community. His following has grown big enough that he recently - and with his wife’s permission - was able to quit his office job and go fishing full time. “I create fishing videos essentially for a living and share them with the world on YouTube. My channel is called Diehard Fishing. I grew up in the Bay Area, so I'm more familiar with this area fishing wise. And more recently I've branched out a little bit doing some traveling. I recently took a trip to Panama, to Alaska and basically all up and down the California coastline.”

Adam has been fishing for all his life. It’s a sort of family tradition. As long as he can remember his father was always bringing him along to nearby beaches to go surf fishing or up to trout streams in the Sierras. He learned little-by-little, year-after-year by rote practice and hands-on experience. As his knowledge grew, so did his passion. “I honestly don't know really exactly what it was that made me love fishing, but I did always. So I was lucky in that aspect that I had my Dad to take me and teach me the basics of fishing. Like how to cast a line or bait a hook. How to tell if you have a fish on or if you're just stuck on a rock or whatever. But yeah, I mean it gets being passed down.”

Regardless of his knowledge, Adam, like every angler knows that sometimes you just don’t catch anything. After getting “skunked” while out for halibut a few times, he turned to an unlikely source for advice, ChatGPT. Adam had used ChatGPT before while working his old office job so he had a crazy thought.

“I’m out fishing and I’m not catching anything and I was thinking. Man, there are so many things with fishing… So I had an idea, let’s just get AI to take care of it all for us.”

So that evening, Adam worked with ChatGPT to develop a plan to catch a halibut off the coast of Monterey. Based on his own deep personal knowledge, the results seem to ring true. However, there were some variations and ideas that he hadn’t tried before. So for the sake of experiment, he decided to follow the ChatGPT results exactly as stated.