What's Real

Chaos erupted the other day on my Spelling Bee app. One of the people in the “Hive Community” confessed that she was using AI to solve the puzzle. The people who solve the puzzle using their own brains and find joy in figuring things out attacked her. It was a brutal takedown. Someone compared himself to John Henry.

I looked up John Henry. When you do a search online lately, the first answer that comes up is generated by AI. But here’s a trick I learned: You can type in what you want to search and add minus AI and the answer will come up the way it used to in the olden days, 2023 ish. It looks like this:

John Henry -AI 

(Make sure you put the minus directly in front of the AI or else you’ll get a whole slew of AI junk.) For the record, back in the late 1800s, John Henry supposedly went to battle with a steam powered drill on the railroad and won. Someone wrote a song about him. The moral is: Fight back against the machines that are taking your jobs. I forgot to mention that John Henry died shortly after. The moral is: The machines win in the end. 

Don’t get me started on how I feel about AI. Besides the fact that it steals human research and writing and art, and pollutes the environment, and destroys jobs, it’s not AI. Meaning, it’s not intelligent. (At least not yet.) You think you’re talking to some sentient being, but you may as well be having a conversation with a magic eight ball. 

Meanwhile a lot of people seem to really enjoy chatting with their magic eight balls. I don’t know how to make sense of this, so I do what I do whenever things don’t make sense to me. I read books. I write. I take walks with the dog. I dig around in the garden. I stand in line at the farmers market and wait to buy an almond croissant. Let me tell you about these almond croissants. 

They are buttery and fluffily layered and studded with the perfect ratio of almonds to sugar. When you bite into one of these croissants, it is still warm from the oven. The woman who bakes these luscious treats looks how you would imagine. She has strong arms from rolling out the dough, pink cheeks, and wears a kerchief on her head like she’s just climbed out of an old painting. Every Saturday hers is the booth you must go to first. 

She sells out within an hour. The problem: she’s late every week, so it’s difficult to know when you should join the line. Go too early, and you’re standing around in the sun watching the baker and her partner unload their truck and carefully set up their booth. Go too late, and you risk getting nothing. 

What is this line for? People who are new to the farmers’ market say. 

Or, 

Whoa, those pastries must be good!

Those of us in line nod smugly at our secret knowledge. It drives my husband crazy. Are the croissants that great? He says to me every week when I make him join me in the line. (He isn’t a big croissant fan. He’s more into the carrot cake at the booth down the street.) While we wait together, he calculates how much it costs, in time, to stand here. 

Seven bucks for the croissant plus a good twenty minutes. What is our twenty minutes worth? he asks me. I don’t know how to answer him. 

What is anything worth? A freshly baked croissant, a painting, a novel. The water supply. The electric grid. Dignity. The creative process. Our brains. What makes us human. What rolls out dough. What pulls the tray out of the oven. What feeds us. What fills us. 

What's real.