AI Smackdown - ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini

Introduction

Chances are you use ChatGPT.  OpenAI’s chatbot had about a year head start on competing large language models like Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot. The latter two offer integration with office productivity suites and man this paragraph is getting boring! Don’t worry, I’ll narrow the focus: in this post I pit these AI chatbots against one another in carrying out identical tasks: an essay and a picture. (Next week I’ll have them write a poem.) These tasks are  probably not what you use chatbots for, but I think they’re a good measure of the AIs’ so-called intelligence, which—in the face of all this uncertainty of where AI is going and what it means for humanity—is probably more interesting than noting how well they answer basic questions or perform routine tasks like writing emails or reports.

(Wondering about the picture? I’ll get to that.)

Now, if you’re an astute reader (which you are or you wouldn’t be here, so congratulations), you’ll be wondering, why even bother evaluating the current capabilities of a technology that is evolving so fast? Wouldn’t this post have a very short shelf life? Those are good questions and here’s my (kind of) short answer: it’s because it’s fun to capture a moment in time and look back on it later, to see how far we’ve come. It’s like watching really old Hollywood movies and appreciating a) how much better the dialogue is in modern film, and b) how much less sexist Americans are now. (Yes, we’ve still got a long way to go, but looking back can help us feel grateful for the progress that’s been made.)

Let me give you an example of how primitive early AI was. As it’s theoretically possible for you to have noticed, I’ve been tracking its progress since 2012, when I tried out Cleverbot. Over the next few years I evaluated the AI used in smartphones. In 2020 I did a test drive of the very first version of OpenAI’s GPT. As described here, all it could do was finish your sentences; you’d type the first half of a sentence and hit tab, and it would finish the sentence for you (as many modern text editors now do). Here’s how the original GPT “helped” me write a short essay about learning to type. I’ve formatted its output in bold italics so you can see what it contributed:

“Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs” is a cool way to pass the time. It is particularly useful for budding gay men to read the words if they are trying to learn how to type on a computer. … Okay, what’s with this guess that my original text had anything to do with ‘gay? that was definitely a pretty random statement to make but it fit, and … no, it didn’t fit. For A.I. to be useful, it must stick to the ‘gay side of the word.’ No. It must stick to the point. I was writing about a sexual deviant. No, I was not! I was writing about the simple act of learning to use the ‘gay keyboard. Also, A.I., you’ve twice screwed up on putting a space between my legs. Okay, fine. I give up. This GPT technology obviously has a lot of potential.

What a gas, right? Of course AI will keep getting better, to the point that what’s considered amazing today will one day seem laughably primitive. Who knows, perhaps you’ve found this post years after I wrote it, and are looking to it to help you remember what it was like to interact with AI through a cumbersome keyboard, rather than having it read your mind automatically via WiFi 12 or 8G cellular technology.

Okay, down to brass tacks. In this post I will evaluate the latest versions of three leading AI chatbots: OpenAI’s ChatGPT (version GPT-5); Google’s Gemini (version 2.5 Flash and Pro); and Microsoft’s Copilot (version Smart GPT-5, based on Microsoft’s collaboration with OpenAI, which Copilot tells me “[goes] far beyond what you’d get from GPT-5 alone”).

Why a scholastic essay? Because that kind of writing is a lot harder than a lot of what AI does, which is just being a really good natural language search engine. Analyzing a large text and writing about it clearly requires something closer to real thought than just fielding a fairly specific question, harvesting the best existing resources on the topic, and mashing them into a concise and nicely formatted answer. For more on the fundamental difference between writing “thoughtfully” and merely researching, see my last post.

Activity #1: academic essay

Much of the hype around AI is its ability to do college kids’ work for them. In a shocking New Yorker article I read recently, a college professor interviewed several students at top universities about their shameless use of A.I. to write their papers, and how well they’re getting away with it. Here’s a crazy example:

A sophomore at Columbia studying computer science told me about a class where she was required to compose a short lecture on a topic of her choosing. “I just put it in [to an A.I. platform] and I maybe edited like two words and submitted it,” she said. Her professor identified her essay as exemplary work, and she was asked to read from it to a class of two hundred students. “I was a little nervous,” she said. But then she realized, “If they don’t like it, it wasn’t me who wrote it, you know?”

So, is the current AI really good enough for the Ivy Leagues? Or at least good enough for your kid’s high school English class? Two and a half years ago I asked ChatGPT (version GPT-3.5) to write an essay describing the use of dramatic irony in a children’s novel, Clarice Bean, Don’t Look Now by Lauren Child. I chose that book because it’s a less cryptic work than, say, Ulysses, which probably nobody, not even James Joyce himself, understood. But even without being written for grown-ups, the Clarice Bean book does feature dramatic irony, as my seven-year-old daughter was able to appreciate. So how did GPT-3.5 do? It crashed and burned, big time, as described here. To see how much the AI has improved, I’ll use the same prompt this time, with the same book.

ChatGPT’s essay

Here is the most salient excerpt of what OpenAI’s GPT-5 came up with:

At the heart of the novel is Clarice’s attempt to navigate friendship, change, and uncertainty. She idolizes her favorite fictional character, Ruby Redfort—a cool, unflappable girl detective who always knows what to do. Clarice, by contrast, often feels helpless when life becomes complicated. Much of the book’s dramatic irony arises from this gap between how Clarice perceives herself and how readers can see her situation. For instance, when Clarice tries to act as confident and worldly as Ruby, her bravado is clearly exaggerated or misplaced. Readers can see that her attempts to emulate Ruby’s poise only highlight her vulnerability. This irony makes Clarice endearing rather than foolish, because we recognize that her misunderstanding stems from innocence and idealism.

This really isn’t bad; I mean, it reads well, the flow is logical, and the essay has the semblance of depth. (It’s a lot better than GPT-3.5, whose entire essay was a hallucination.) Still, this analysis is rather flawed. For one thing, it completely misrepresents Clarice’s character. She actually exhibits no bravado, and puts on no airs. Her behavior is quite subdued; in fact, she withdraws from friends and classmates entirely. Meanwhile, the AI’s essay lacks the specific detail it would need to get a passing grade in a legitimate lit class.

Now, to be fair, much of the power of these chatbots comes from the user’s ability to iterate, guiding the AI with very precise prompts and helping it along when it stumbles. So I gave GPT-5 another chance, the way a TA would with an undergraduate, asking it, “Are there any scenes in particular that really show the dramatic irony, vs. generalizations? What is the best example of this literary device in the novel?” Here’s what it came back with:

The most striking use of dramatic irony in the novel comes when Clarice’s best friend, Betty Moody, suddenly goes missing. Clarice interprets Betty’s disappearance through the lens of her idol, Ruby Redfort … Convinced that something thrilling is afoot, Clarice imagines Betty has vanished into an adventure or secret mission, perhaps with spies involved.

The reader, however, quickly realizes something else: Betty hasn’t disappeared into a mystery, but into a family crisis. Her parents have separated, and Betty has been taken away unexpectedly. Clarice, too young to pick up on the signs of adult conflict, mistakes emotional upheaval for suspense.  This is classic dramatic irony — the audience understands the real reason for Betty’s absence long before Clarice does.

This really would be a classic case of dramatic irony, but there’s one problem: GPT-5 is hallucinating! Betty doesn’t suddenly go missing; she announces to Clarice that her family is moving away, and then they do. There is no mystery for Clarice to solve, no imagined spies or secret mission, and Clarice misunderstands nothing. The chatbot states that the reader knows that Betty’s parents are separating but Clarice doesn’t; this is actually backwards: Clarice only fears Betty’s parents are divorcing, and they’re not. So as nicely written as GPT-5’s essay is, it gets the basic facts wrong. (The only real dramatic irony in the essay is that we know something ChatGPT doesn’t!)

When I challenged GPT-5 on this, the AI casually acknowledged that it may have gotten stuff wrong because it actually hasn’t read the book. It proceeded to fact-check itself using three dubious secondary sources: “TV Tropes,” “Books for Kids Blog,” and “Books for Keeps.” Then it offered, “If you like, I can check for direct quotes from the text to confirm exactly what the author states about Betty’s situation and whether divorce is explicitly ruled out.” WTF?! GPT-5 blithely—and confidently—trotted out this nice essay despite having no access to the source material! What actual student would be shameless enough to try that?

I’m going to give ChatGPT a D on this. This is a big step up from last time, but it still has a long way to go. Obviously an AI would do better with older literature, like the classics that are past their copyright and in the public domain, but I suspect most of its training data will always be other papers and run-of-the-mill critical criticism, not the work of the authors themselves.

Copilot’s essay

On to the next contestant, Microsoft’s Copilot. It has different versions based on what you’re trying to do (e.g., simple search vs. deeper analysis). I engaged Smart Mode for the essay. Here are the highlights:

A central example of dramatic irony emerges in Clarice’s interpretation of Clem Hansson, the new girl at school. Clarice believes Clem is aligning herself with Justin Broach, a classmate Clarice views as a “sociopath.” This assumption fuels Clarice’s isolation and resentment, reinforcing her belief that Clem is shallow and disloyal. However, readers can infer — through subtle cues and Clarice’s unreliable narration — that Clem’s behavior is not malicious, and that Clarice’s judgment is clouded by her own insecurities and grief over Betty’s departure. This disconnect between Clarice’s perspective and the likely reality creates dramatic irony: readers recognize that Clarice is misreading the situation, which deepens our empathy for her while also injecting humor into her exaggerated reactions.

Another layer of dramatic irony stems from Clarice’s obsession with the Ruby Redfort Survival Handbook, a fictional spy guide she consults for advice on navigating life. Clarice treats the handbook as gospel, applying its cryptic wisdom to everyday dilemmas. For instance, she fixates on the idea that “your worst worry is the one you haven’t even thought to worry about,” which paradoxically increases her anxiety. Readers, however, can see that the handbook’s advice is often absurd or irrelevant, and that Clarice’s reliance on it is a coping mechanism rather than a source of genuine guidance. This ironic gap between Clarice’s faith in Ruby Redfort and the reader’s recognition of its impracticality adds both humor and poignancy to the narrative.

Right off the bat, Copilot doesn’t commit any major blunders, in terms of hallucination. I would say the reader only infers that Clem’s friendly gestures toward Clarice are sincere, as we don’t have anything concrete to go on, and Clarice’s hunches aren’t obviously inferior to ours. I also dislike the quotation marks around “sociopath” because they imply that Clarice has Justin figured all wrong, which would be another example of dramatic irony, except that Justin most certainly is a sociopath. (He assaults classmates, extorts them for money, and kidnaps Clem’s pet rabbit.) In my book, Clarice’s mystification at Clem’s interaction with this jerk is understandable and certainly not exaggerated. Moving on to the Survival Handbook, it’s advice is arguably absurd and, on the face of things, irrelevant (as it’s written for spies, not kids), but Clarice does grasp (and point out) its limitations. In a moment of epiphany, she asks herself, “What is the point of reading about all this survival information about lions and tigers and sharks? … And I have read her Spy Guide: How to Know Things Without Knowing Things—and all I have discovered is that I know nothing at all.”

But all this is boring, I know, and the main news is that this essay (or more to the point a version that’s been polished up by a student who at least read the actual book) would probably get a C at UC Santa Barbara, perhaps a C- at UC Berkeley, and who knows, maybe an A at Columbia. But does this mean Copilot is now ready to steal our jobs? No, not yet. If it offered to ghost-write my next albertnet post, I’d politely decline.

Gemini’s essay

And how did Gemini, our final contestant, do? Here are some highlights from its first effort:

The irony primarily revolves around Clarice’s attempts to manage her mounting anxieties—namely her fear of a looming geography test and her worry about her best friend Betty Moody potentially moving away—while remaining oblivious to the humorous and poignant truths the reader recognizes.

The most potent source of dramatic irony is Clarice’s belief that she can control her own anxieties and the world around her by actively not confronting them. The geography test, which Clarice refers to ominously as “the Big Test,” is a persistent undercurrent of dread. She employs elaborate avoidance strategies, from organizing a “Worries Box” to distract herself with minor, manageable tasks. The irony lies in the reader’s understanding that avoidance only amplifies anxiety; the test is drawing closer with every page turned, yet Clarice invests her energy in delaying the inevitable.

The technique is equally effective in building the emotional tension surrounding Betty Moody’s potential move. Clarice views every sign of Betty’s packing or preoccupation through the singular lens of impending abandonment. The reader, however, is frequently given clues—through overheard adult conversations or context within the illustrations—that the situation is more mundane or less catastrophic than Clarice imagines. For instance, the boxes are not necessarily for a long-distance move, but perhaps a temporary one, or simply a major reorganization.

Again, the AI has written an essay that kind of sounds good and might fool somebody unfamiliar with the book, but it ultimately falls down because it has the basic facts wrong. Like ChatGPT, Gemini has no direct access to the full text and is just guessing (well, generating) based on the flotsam and jetsam that critics, reviewers, et al have strewn around the Internet. Gemini’s mistakes are not subtle. For one thing, there is no geography test mentioned anywhere in the book. Meanwhile, Clarice has a worries notebook, not a box, and she doesn’t spend undue time writing in it or employing avoidance strategies. Moreover, there is no scene in the book in which Betty packs boxes for her move, and the situation with Betty is not “more mundane” or “less catastrophic” than Clarice imagines: her best friend literally moves from London to San Francisco.

In the spirit of fairness, I gave Gemini another prompt to try to hone its response and focus on a specific scene of dramatic irony, and it came back with more of the same about the geography test and Betty’s move, adding, “The peak of this irony comes when the news of Betty’s situation is finally revealed, specifically that Betty is not moving away forever, but just temporarily to the apartment upstairs due to a family situation (often related to house renovations).” Completely false, and completely lame.

I pointed out all the errors and asked Gemini if that was really the best it could do. It replied, “The detailed essay you requested on Clarice Bean, Don’t Look Now was written using the Gemini 2.5 Flash model. If you were looking for even deeper, more complex analysis, the Gemini 2.5 Pro model (available with Gemini Advanced) would be the choice optimized for that specific level of complex, multi-step reasoning.” Oh, so if I want a better essay I have to pay for it? What cheek! I almost decided to just give Gemini an F and move on. That would have made this post shorter. But, doggone it, if I’m going to do this, I’d better do it right.

Gemini’s second essay

I switched to version 2.5 Pro (which turns is offered on a limited basis for free) and here’s the gist of its new essay:

The central irony is this: the very “spy” techniques Clarice uses to gain control and uncover the truth are precisely what blind her to it, generating both the novel’s humor and its profound sense of childhood helplessness.

This irony is sharpened in Clarice’s “investigation” of her parents. Overwhelmed by stress (which the reader understands is likely related to their friends’ move, finances, or just the chaos of family life), Clarice’s parents have tense, private conversations. Clarice, filtering these events through her Ruby Redfort lens, interprets them as “clues” to a secret, impending divorce. She misreads their mundane exhaustion as a sinister conspiracy. The dramatic irony is that Clarice’s hyper-vigilance, her constant search for meaning, makes her less perceptive, not more…

Ultimately, the book’s title, Don’t Look Now, serves as the most direct summary of its central irony. Clarice believes her “looking”—her spying and investigating—is the solution. But the reader knows she is refusing to look at the one thing that matters: the deep, painful, and very normal emotion of sadness. She avoids the emotional core of her problem by obsessing over its mechanics.

I have to say, this is much better. Version 2.5 Pro didn’t hallucinate, and its argument is more cohesive. It’s not perfect; for example, it misses Clarice’s epiphany about the limits of the Ruby Redfort book and thus overstates her lack of perception. But this essay so much better than what 2.5 Flash “wrote.”

So is that it, I give Gemini a C+ and move on? Not quite: remember, this chatbot benefited not only from my invoking its 2.5 Pro version, but from all the coaching I gave it in the chat. This distinction is crucial: AI LLMs do much better when you feed them high quality prompts and lots of feedback to supplement their training data. It’s equally important to understand that your input is not itself training data that the model can use going forward. The benefit you provide dies with your session. Thus, AI doesn’t learn and get smarter the way a human would; its progress is much more gradual. Which brings me to:

Gemini’s third essay

To see how 2.5 Pro would do without all the coaching, I opened a fresh session on my work laptop (i.e., totally different login, no history of my chats). (Don’t worry, I did this on the weekend.) (If you’re my boss reading this, congratulations on finding my blog, and please consider that my working knowledge of AI is surely valuable in the workplace and you should give me a raise.)

I guess I wasn’t surprised that 2.5 Pro didn’t do so well this time, but what did surprise me is just how badly it crashed and burned. Here’s an excerpt:

The plot is set in motion by a catalyst of deliberate misinterpretation. A cryptic, unsigned letter containing the vague warning, “something terrible is going to happen,” is received not as a piece of misdelivered junk mail but as a profound, personal omen… The humor is generated directly from this disparity; the audience … understands that the “terrible” event will be domestic, not devastating. The characters’ frantic preparations—installing locks, suspecting neighbors—are thus rendered as escalating absurdities, a performance for an audience that already knows the final act.

OMG, it’s the worst essay yet: total hallucination. There is no cryptic letter in this novel, no locks installed, no suspicion of the neighbors. I called this out, the chatbot apologized profusely for having accidentally based its essay on a different book entirely, and then it tried again:

The gap between perception and reality generates the novel’s central tension. While Clarice is hunting for evidence of international espionage, the audience is processing signs of a painful family separation. The “mysterious man” Karl meets is not a sinister agent, but, as the reader strongly suspects, his father.

Again, pure hallucination! There is simply no “mysterious man” in the entire book. I challenged the chatbot, asking how it gets its source material, both when a work is under copyright and when it’s in the public domain. Gemini explained that for public domain works its training data contains the full texts and also “the centuries of critical, scholarly, and secondary sources,” and for copyrighted works “is built from secondary sources … book reviews, detailed plot summaries, fan wikis, essays, and educational matters about the book.” So basically it’s amateur hour: the AI can’t really differentiate between, say, an esteemed college professor and a (gasp!) lowly blogger. As you can see this doesn’t always work so well. I’m going to give Gemini 2.5 Pro a D+.

As an aside that perhaps ought to be my thesis, I’d like to point out that the better AI gets at writing student papers, the worse off students—and the whole institution of higher education—will be. After all, the point isn’t for students to edify their instructors through their observations; the point is for the students to think and write for themselves. Yes, this is hard, but the right kind of hard, and through this struggle they ideally learn how to think and write, and can one day contribute in the realms of actual, non-student writing such as books, articles, or—worst case scenario—blogs.

Activity #2: original art

I’ve tinkered a lot with AI-generated art, usually to generate pictures to run at the top of my blog posts. It’s been pretty hit-or-miss; a picture which doesn’t stray into uncanny valley territory, or have major gaff like the wrong number of fingers on a hand, is all I’ve realistically hoped for. Today’s exercise is simple: I pitted the platforms against one another in the task of creating a picture for this post, featuring Clarice Bean. You can see the winner at the top, though you might cry foul: the art I ended up using is from Whisk, Google’s latest “experimental” imagine generator. I resorted to this new tool because I just wasn’t happy with the runners-up, as you shall see.

ChatGPT’s art

I asked ChatGPT, “Can you make a drawing for me of Clarice Bean reading albertnet on her tablet?” Not surprisingly, it mentioned the copyright and said, “I can’t generate or reproduce images of her or derivative works featuring her likeness” but offered to “generate an image of a cartoonish, freckled, red-haired girl reading a tablet, in the style of a children’s book illustration, but not resembling or referencing Clarice Bean specifically.” I agreed and here’s what it came up with:

I think you’ll agree that’s just about the most boring picture ever. It also has the classic issue of the subject holding the tablet backwards. This is just not that hard a prompt … what gives?

I said, “Make it a more realistic picture, please, and she should look a bit older, and have her in an armchair in her attic bedroom with a desk lamp, and reading the Ruby Redfort Survival Guide.” Maddeningly, the chatbot came up with a picture that was almost perfect, except that made her look a bit too old (about 15) and gave her Instagram-worthy boobs, which seemed inappropriate and unseemly. The picture didn’t show a lot of skin, but still … totally unusable (and I don’t even want to post it here because it’s in such poor taste). I replied, “Please make her a bit younger and flat-chested.” The chatbot chided me: “I can’t modify or generate an image based on physical or anatomical details like that.” Like it was basically calling me pervy! It even offered to “create a child-appropriate illustration,” as though I’d asked for something that wasn’t. Sheesh.

Copilot’s art

I gave Copilot the same initial prompt I’d given ChatGPT, and here’s what it came up with:

This is almost as boring as ChatGPT’s picture, and for some reason it looks faded and I couldn’t get Gemini to fix that. At least the tablet is facing the right way. Note that Clarice is wearing the same red-and-white-striped shirt in this picture as the ChatGPT version of her, which is curious given that such a shirt appears nowhere in any of her books (at least that I can find). It’s actually the shirt Waldo wears, which I’d prove to you if I could only find him.

Other similarities of this art include the hair being the same length, the art having the same level of detail (barely more than a cartoon), and a complete absence of any details in the background. In delivering the picture, Copilot said, “Here you go - a stylized, collage-like illustration of a child reading a tablet, inspired by the playful textures you mentioned.” I don’t know what it means by collage-like, and I didn’t mention any “playful textures.” Whatever, chatbot.

Gemini’s art

I gave exactly the same art to Gemini, and it produced the corniest, least aesthetically pleasing picture yet:

Obviously this is a matter of taste, but would you agree there is no charm here? And what’s with the red-and-white-striped shirt appearing here, too? What are these AIs keying off of?

In Gemini’s defense, at least the little thought bubbles bear a slight resemblance to some of the art in the actual book. But again the tablet is backward and “albertnet” is spelled “alphabert” (weird misspellings being a common screw-up with AI art).

Frustrated by not having any good art yet, I tried ImageFx, another Google AI tool, and it gave me a photo-style picture with lavish detail, featuring both Ruby and her brother rocking red-and-white-striped shirts. I think it’s some kind of global AI conspiracy. What a relief when Whisk broke the cycle and generated the worthy picture you saw at the top of this post. I particularly like how Clarice is kind of staring off into space instead of at the book, clearly either pondering what she’s just read or distracted from her book by all the difficulties she’s working through.

Well, at long last that’s it for today. Tune in next week because I plan to pitch these chatbots against one another again, this time writing poems in dactylic trimeter based on the best prompt an AI was even given.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Tech Reflection - Two Sides of AI

“This Halloween, I’m dressing up as generative AI. I’m going to show up to the party without a costume and just start stealing pieces of other people’s outfits.”
— An X dispatch my niece screenshotted for me

Introduction

Is AI the amazing new technology that’s changing the world, or a petty thief that just steals people’s ideas and passes them off as its own? Does it actually carry out anything approaching thought, or is it just a zombie, stalking humans’ digital relics and muttering “brains … brains … brains” as it angles to get a piece of us?

In this post, I examine the two most fundamental functions AI chatbots can carry out, and draw a distinction between the two. I believe this can give us useful guidance in deciding how we ought to use this game-changing technology.

Ecclesiastes vs. Barthelme

AI is evolving fast, perhaps faster than our ability to understand it. I’m having to adapt; for example, I’ve stopped spelling it “A.I.” because leading media outfits like The New Yorker and The New York Times have now eschewed the periods. So if you’re reading this on your phone in a sans serif font you may have initially thought I was writing about there being two sides of Albert or Alfred. I asked ChatGPT what to do about this ambiguity between a capital “i” and a lowercase “L,” and it suggested I could “kern or tweak the glyphs.” I’m not exactly an expert at kerning glyphs, so I asked the chatbot how. It gave me all kinds of strategies, the best one for my blog format (HTML) being this:

AI <!-- default -->

A<span style="letter-spacing:0.05em;">I</span> <!-- slightly looser -->

So you can see, GPT is right there with an answer when queried about a technical operation that has been done before. But what about doing something creative and original? This is a fundamental distinction and I am going to propose we look at AI from two largely separate perspectives, for which I’ve invented labels:

• Operational mode – I thought about calling this Ecclesiastes mode, for “no new thing under the sun.” This mode is about helping with a nuts-and-bolts operation (e.g., HTML scripting, DNS routing) that somebody else, probably many people in fact, already figured out and documented out there on the Internet for AI to gobble up, distill, pretty up, and present. Here, AI is basically a really good large language model that excels at combing through gobs of chaff to find answers, and organizes and summarizes information very clearly. I wouldn’t say it’s as parasitic as what’s suggested by the X epigram above, because lots of people freely post technical stuff to the Internet just to be helpful, without thinking of it as sacrosanct intellectual property.
• Creation mode – I think of this as Barthelme mode, named for the writer Donald Barthelme, because I think he’s the epitome of totally original, wacky, one-of-a-kind creative types with an absolutely distinctive voice. In other words, this is the intelligence that I am quite convinced AI could never approach. By creation I mean using the full capability of your own mind to advance ideas that are new, and yours.

The trouble is, many people don’t make any distinction between these two general areas of AI, so on the basis of its prowess as a natural language search engine, they are be led to believe it can do a perfectly good job at creation mode. And since most people aren’t English majors, and in fact don’t respect English majors, AI platforms get to roll out some pretty inferior writing and everybody thinks it’s genius. (This widespread lack of sophistication is also why McDonald’s makes so much money.)

So what?

For many years, as I’ve lamented at length in these pages, kids have been told all the jobs are in tech, and they need to study STEM. And now, many of the kids who dutifully followed these marching orders are graduating from college with Computer Science degrees and not getting jobs, and tech is laying off gobs of people. Next time I meet a STEM major I’m gonna ask him, “Computer Science? What are you gonna do with that?”

So how did STEM go from meal ticket to a food stamp? Well, I think it’s largely because AI is actually getting pretty good at the operational mode. It writes software so well, all industry needs is a seasoned coder to check it. Will we still have seasoned coders in 20 or 30 years, when all the current ones have retired and nobody has come through the ranks to replace them? Probably not, but that’s a whole other blog post somebody has surely already written. (I did blog about ChatGPT’s prowess with operational mode earlier this year, here.)

So as we look at AI, and particularly its role in our personal and professional lives, I think we need to ask ourselves what we have to offer that is rare and valuable, and how AI can help. Specifically, I believe we should be asking the question: how do we use operational AI to handle rote stuff, so we have more time to develop our unique, original ideas—so as to bring out our inner Barthelme?

What to use AI for

I have to confess, I love AI for light research when I’m blogging. The kernel of my posts always comes from my own brain, usually from pondering all kinds of things while I’m out on a solo bike ride. But ChatGPT is a great way to chase down and pinpoint something I had vaguely committed to memory. For example, when working on a recent post I asked it, “Can you track down the Lore Segal quote from ‘Her First American’ about ‘protocol is the art of not doing what comes naturally’?” I probably could have found this with Google, but the AI helped (and might have been indispensable here had I not remembered the name of the novel). ChatGPT was also super helpful when I was writing my post on induction ranges, in researching certain facts (e.g., energy efficiency info and whether government rebates are available).

AI is also pretty helpful at work, where I use a “walled garden” version my employer provides. (It doesn’t use any of my chats as training data for the AI’s ongoing education.) In fact, my employer exhorts all us employees to use AI every day. It’s like with any great tool: we’re expected to work more efficiently because we have it, so we’d better use it well. Recently, I took several product specification documents for different Internet hardware devices, fed them into an AI utility, and asked it to read them all, highlight the differences among the different makes and models, and tell me which one I want for xyz purpose. This was much faster than poring through everything myself, which is a decidedly operational task. The report it generated was clear and reasonably concise, and probably won’t be read very carefully anyway. In fact, someone will probably upload it to a chatbot and have it summarized. All this is fine with me.

One other great use for AI chatbots is to ask them for instructions for quotidian technical matters in your personal life, like disabling the child lock on your new microwave oven, charging your new bike’s electronic shifting, or restoring your playlist after updating your smartphone’s MP3 app. Sure, these are things you could look up on YouTube, but often that search can be tricky, and the videos can be agonizingly slow. The following video tutorial, which is crisp and concise and beautifully shot, is perhaps the exception that proves the rule:

I guess one benefit with YouTube is it’s less likely to hallucinate. I asked ChatGPT if my bike’s brake/shift levers have button cell batteries, and it explained in great detail how there are actually wires running from the battery pack to each lever, so they get recharged along with the derailleurs. The chatbot even drew me a nice diagram to illustrate this. Alas, it was hallucinating: the levers totally do have button cell batteries that need to be periodically replaced.  But all this being said, it’s easy enough to sanity check this kind of output, and I usually get a good answer from AI when I can’t locate a product owner’s manual or don’t feel like leafing through the 50-page one that I have, trying to get past the 14 foreign language versions.

What NOT to do with AI

I think where people get into trouble with AI is when they try to get it to do their work for them, particularly writing documents or correspondence that they then pass off as their own. In some cases this is an ethical or even legal matter; as I described here, the New York Times is suing OpenAI for copyright violation, and I have firsthand evidence of ChatGPT essentially plagiarizing this blog. But I doubt you overmuch care about that. There are two bigger issues, I think:

• What this “creation mode” usage does to the quality of “your” writing
• What it does to the quality of your thinking

There’s this notion that you can ask a chatbot to write something for you, anything from an email to an invitation to a work report, and then you can just polish it up a bit, and you’re done. No more writer’s block! No more outlines, or worrying how to organize your thoughts! That might be okay for a very basic report, like what I described comparing features of tech hardware. But when you start from scratch with your own document, you’re not just leveraging AI’s impersonal, sprawling training data; you’re using your own—everything you’ve experienced, heard, read, and dreamt of. It’s your own personal muse, not the generic Internet one.

Honestly, for anything loftier than a rote technical document—that is to say, anything designed to edify, persuade, or entertain—haven’t you seen for yourself how AI can fail? Like, you’ll get this chipper invitation to a family reunion and it’s using corny phrases like “drum roll please” and joking about your family’s dance moves, and it just seems generic and clichéd? That’s all AI can do. It doesn’t know you or your family or friends well enough to say anything truly clever, and all the polish you want to give its rough draft won’t help. Your invitation will never have real style, along the lines of, “L— gets dibs on the guest room (which she may still anachronistically refer to as “her” “bedroom”) and its magnificent new king-sized guest bed. If you’re nice she might invite you to a slumber party there. Other guests can fight over the legendary Futon of Sand down in the home office. Beyond that, we have two large sofas for those interested in the college-esque party-‘til-dawn experience. We would not be offended if one or more parties were to seek a motel/hotel/AirBNB/VRBO, especially given the relatively small number of bathrooms here (i.e., one). Regarding rumors that the men are encouraged to pee in the backyard, this is true, but please stick to the planting beds and the fountain.” See how much better that is?

Now, you might be thinking, “Wait, I’m not a blogger and I wasn’t an English major. Cranking out an email or an essay may be easy enough for Dana, but I just want to get this task done and checked off.” But stop and think for a moment: what would you like to be good at, in life? Please tell me the answer isn’t just “typing good prompts into AI.” Wouldn’t you like to be articulate, interesting, and capable of thinking on your feet? Because what are you going to do at a cocktail party, or a job interview, or a non-virtual work meeting, when you don’t have a chatbot to help you, and that’s the habit you’ve let yourself fall into? The reality is, we get good at thinking by struggling to do it, for ourselves, the old fashioned way.

So let’s not undervalue written communication by outsourcing it to AI. The best case scenario is that it’ll do an inferior job, replacing what could have been original thought with a pile of trusty clichés and/or stealthily plagiarized, slyly anonymized content. The worst case scenario is that it’ll actually get good enough that you never have to write for yourself again, and your brain can atrophy to the point that you’re not even a thinker anymore … just a chatbot operator.

Because you don’t care

Gosh, I guess I drifted into high-and-mighty, pompous, full-on pontification there, and I feel pretty sheepish about it! Fortunately, I’m realistic enough to sense you snickering, and I know you’re going to turn right around and keep on using AI for whatever you can possibly think of. That being the case, check back next week because I’m going to catch you up on the latest AI technologies and how much they’ve improved since my last check-in. Whether your chatbot of choice is ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot, I’ll have you covered. Until then, I’ll be getting back to what I really enjoy in life: kerning glyphs.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?

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When Your Loved One Buys a Juicer

Introduction

Today I tackle the unpleasant topic of what to do when a family member or close friend has purchased a juicer. This is a trying ordeal for all involved, and if not handled properly can lead to a host of negative outcomes up to and including complete estrangement. If someone close to you has already purchased a juicer, perhaps it’s not too late for this post to help. And if such a purchase hasn’t happened yet, don’t be naïve: it can happen to anyone, even you.

Why do people buy juicers?

When a person buys a juicer, it’s tempting to think a normal consumerist impulse is in play: a friend has one, it was on sale, etc. Don’t be fooled: the juicer purchase occupies an entirely different realm than, say, the harmless acquisition of a food processor or “bullet” style blender. To understand why an otherwise reasonable person would buy something that does not have, and cannot have, any utility whatsoever, you need to delve into how the brain works and how a this kind of destructive behavior can be essentially “programmed.”

On the face of it, such “programming” doesn’t look so different from regular advertising, with its slick photo or video showcasing a product to good effect, usually including an attractive person (whether a celebrity endorser, a model, or social media influencer) who creates mimetic desire in the consumer. But in reality, promotion of a juicer is far more sophisticated, and the campaign is deployed extremely precisely to capture the consumer at his or her very most vulnerable.

Remarkably, instead of seeking out a person who is emotionally isolated and has low self-esteem, juicer marketers use every modern technology available (e.g., tracking cookies or pixels, sentiment analysis within social media posts, etc.) to watch for an uplift in optimism. This is the key vulnerability the juicer industry exploits: the erroneous sense that anything is possible, even making nutritious juices in your own home. The peculiar nature of this scenario makes it very hard for loved ones to spot early warning signs. It’s not uncommon, for example, for a member of the juicer-buyer’s household to later report, “I can’t understand it … she seemed fine, she seemed happy!”

Consequences of buying a juicer

The most commonly feared consequence of a juicer purchase happens to be a myth: that it will lead to constant messes that can be extremely difficult to clean up, particularly when substances like beets, berries, pomegranate juice, and/or turmeric are involved. While this certainly can happen, it isn’t really the central problem, because the reality is, most juicer-buyers only use their juicer once. This might seem outlandish, given how expensive juicers are, but if you’ve ever actually drunk the vegetable liquid produced by this appliance, you’ll immediately understand the rationale for never using it a second time. The reality is, nothing produced by the juicer is actually palatable … it only ever seemed like a good idea. The juicer-buyer will likely intend to use the device periodically, even habitually, but is almost certain to never build up enough gumption to do so.

In fact, the most severe consequence of the juicer purchase is the deep shame that the buyer feels every time he or she sees it in the back of a cabinet. Juicers are not small—in fact, they are the very epitome of the giant, single-function kitchen appliance that home owners should avoid, other examples being the bread machine or electric can opener. (Only a toaster is arguably worth the space.) With most such encumbrances, family members may hope to see it offloaded to Goodwill or some other thrift store—but the juicer, in most cases, will not be. The reason? Cognitive dissonance. The juicer-buyer spent so much on it, he is loathe to admit it’s worthless, and the sunk cost fallacy usually crops up, meaning the family is stuck with this thing for life. And every time the buyer sees it, he is likely to feel subconscious stirrings of regret around not only of the folly of having acquired it, but of the ongoing self-delusion driving him to keep it. Whether or not these feelings bubble up to the surface, the juicer-buyer usually lacks the resolve to squarely confront the problem. Hence the festering shame … the juicer might as well be a scarlet letter.

How to help your loved one 

Of course the juicer-buyer is not only hurting herself. The myriad case histories of these purchases are simply heartbreaking, as entire families are impacted. The buyer’s spouse is bewildered as to not only the extravagant uselessness of the object, but of the purchasing decision having been made unilaterally, with no warning or consultation. Meanwhile, children lose faith in the parent who bought the juicer, in light of this inexplicably reckless behavior, and this can lead to a crisis of trust and consequent feelings of insecurity. Then there’s the clutter of the juicer itself, taking up valuable cabinet or countertop space. But while it’s understandable for family members to feel hurt, we must never forget that the buyer is the central victim. Here are some guidelines for properly handling the situation, so as to avoid further harm.

Lead with empathy

It is understandably tempting to express your incredulity at the act of purchase, without pausing to frame your inquiry carefully. It might seem perfectly reasonable to blurt out, “What part of don’t drink your calories do you not understand?!” Or you might demand, “Why would we throw away the best part of fruit—all that dietary fiber—and consume only the part that’s bad for us!?” But this kind of reaction is a big mistake, on two levels. First, since the buyer already knows deep down inside that he has made a mistake, this will only increase his latent remorse. Second, this antagonistic confrontation may drive the buyer into deeper denial, while fanning the flames of what is bound to be a difficult dialogue that could drag on for years.

Thus, it’s crucial to react with kindness and concern rather than confronting the buyer aggressively. Let her tell her story, and try to validate her position. “So … this juicer,” you might begin. “Are you envisioning making delicious and nutritive smoothies for the family?” You might be surprised to learn that your innocent assumption—that she was planning tasty shakes with fruit juice, yogurt, and nuts—was dead wrong, and that she’s planning to go straight to making vegetable drinks, even something with kale. Don’t kid yourself: juicers are not just blenders on steroids. They are specifically designed and marketed to exploit the rare but powerful delusion that vegetable-based beverages are drinkable. 

As disturbing as this is, try to be patient and supportive as your loved one explains her dedication to the family’s health, and the benefits of leafy greens high in vitamins K and A, antioxidants like quercetin and kaempferol, and omega-3 fatty acids. When she describes how much easier juicing is than making a salad, try not to immediately contradict her by pointing out how hard a juicer is to clean, especially given its oleophilic plastic bowl and dome. Remember, this buyer is already in a highly vulnerable state … if she weren’t, she wouldn’t have bought the juicer in the first place! So instead, as strange and inappropriate as this may feel, thank her for thinking of the family’s health. Remember, if you’re going to eventually pick up the pieces and move on, you need her to feel like you’re on her side.

Let the juicer-buyer fail

It can be so hard to just stand by and watch a loved one fail, but in the case of a juicer, it’s actually the best thing you can do. If the purchaser perceives a battle of wills between the two of you, his judgment is bound to be further clouded. Just watch and wait, and when that first batch of kale, cucumber, carrot, and beet concoction comes out, accept the proffered glass willingly. (Honestly, you have no choice anyway.) Promote the drink to the children enthusiastically, as though they don’t sense your skepticism. And then: pretend to enjoy it. Don’t worry, you won’t be working against yourself, for the simple reason that you will inevitably come up short in your play-acting. Not even Edward Norton or Frances McDormand could pull off a realistic impression of someone enjoying a vegetable beverage. Your vain attempt to avoid wincing, grimacing, puckering, or even gagging, and the pleasant smile you try to arrange, will be duly noted. In fact, you will be invoking the juicer-buyer’s empathy.

Extend this strategy to the clean-up. Don’t offer to wash the juicer, no matter how badly you may want to get it out of your sight so you can begin trying to put the entire wretched affair behind you. Let the sprawling apparatus just sit there on the counter, its clear dome spattered with green flecks, looking like somebody actually projectile-vomited inside it. Work around the juicer using the limited remaining counter space, and in fact let the buyer see you being a good sport about it: that is, let her sit with the consequences. If you give in and wash the juicer for her, you’re being an enabler. And if cleaning the kitchen is normally your job anyway, do a poor job with the juicer. Let the residue of beet juice, coconut milk, and/or flax seeds adhere to the sides … the juicer-buyer needs to see all this. (And if the juicer gets put away without being up to your normal standards of cleanliness, don’t fret. Bear in mind it will never be used again anyway.)

Be alert to collateral damage

If you have children, watch for any warning signs that they are coping poorly. Seeing a juicer in action, and knowing it was purchased intentionally, may cause them to doubt the foundation of reliable, competent parenting they rely so heavily upon. If necessary, have a private conversation with your kid(s), emphasizing that anyone can make a mistake like this under certain circumstances. Make this a teachable moment about the evils of targeted advertising campaigns and the ruthlessness of corporations in exploiting our vulnerabilities. Draw attention to your spouse’s overall track record, emphasizing how this behavior truly was an anomaly. And remind your kid(s) that, as hard as it may be to believe, your spouse had the best of intentions and a sincere belief this was in the family’s best interest.

How to move on

While it’s understandable to seek closure in a situation like this, consider that it should not come at the cost of the juicer-buyer’s humiliation. Put this purchase in the proper perspective: your family is only out a few hundred bucks. Don’t get me wrong, “only” does seem preposterous in the context of a totally worthless appliance, but in the big scheme of things, it’s not that big a deal. After all, your loved one didn’t take in a violent rescue dog with expensive health problems, or get scammed into investing in fraudulent cryptocurrency. Just bide your time, let the juicer molder away in a back cabinet, and reflect on all your loved one’s fine qualities. And remind yourself that all kinds of people buy juicers … you just never hear about it. Humans are not perfect. We all make mistakes.

Now, depending on various factors—the level of rapport you have with your loved one; her overall mental health; her sense of humor—it may be possible to ease the ongoing emotional burden of this purchase with a little levity. Coming across the cursed appliance, you might say, brightly, “Oh, the juicer! We should do another veggie beverage!” This is risky, of course, if you don’t get the tone exactly right. Imagine how distressing it would be if your loved one thought you were serious. It is probably safer, if you try humor at all, to be a bit more vague. For example, the next time the family suffers a major setback, you could say, “Well, at least we still have our juicer.” Again, this is a risky move, as it could be construed as sarcastic, and adding insult to injury. Remember, the purchase of this juicer will haunt your loved one for years … I would always err on the side of caution.

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From the Archives - Return to Civilization

Introduction

Back in 1994, as chronicled here, here, here, here, and here, my wife and I did a 9-month bike tour across the US. We’d quit our jobs and moved out of our apartments beforehand, got married along the way, and then returned to San Francisco to resume our regularly scheduled lives. But before we could find an apartment and a job or two, we had some unfinished business: a (second) honeymoon in Hawaii, which was a wedding present from my then-stepdad. We’d had to delay this initially, since post-wedding we had five more months of bike touring ahead. Thus, we took the Hawaii trip in December before settling back down; it was a bit like Extended Play in a car-race video game. This mini-memoir from my archives details the re-entry.

March 20, 1995

Hawaii was great, though honestly staying in hotels would have been pretty welcome after all the camping on the bike tour. We were also a little disappointed in our guidebook, which erroneously said all public beaches were legal for camping in Hawaii. I think the writer meant to say no beaches are legal, because as we toured around the islands we kept getting kicked out by a ranger, sometimes in the middle of the night. One exit was so hasty, I managed to lose one of our backpacks and all its contents.

Oddly, this led to the highlight of the entire trip. We’d gotten up just before dawn to sneak away from the public beach where we’d camped when a native Hawaiian family down the beach from us called us over. They gave us a hot tip: giant turtles come in every morning with the high tide to feed on the seaweed and stuff on the rocks. The family offered to let us use their snorkels and fins, and urged us to go right away, though the sun wasn’t up yet, to go swim with the turtles! No joke!

So we borrowed fins and headed down the black sand beach. My fins were too small, and gravel lodged in them, scratching up my feet, and I walked like a klutz through the sand, and the water was bracing (even in Hawaii) at that hour, and the whole thing seemed pretty iffy … but as soon as we swam out a bit it was all worth it. About a dozen giant turtles, with shells about four feet across, were swimming all around us, and barely seemed to notice us! I had this disconcerting feeling that if they wanted to, they could eat me alive. They’re such good swimmers there’s no way I could’ve escaped. (The locals had said these weren’t snapping turtles, but still.) They’re really graceful creatures, and I discovered I could just drift along, about five feet from a turtle, in and out with the tide. At one point one turned his head to look at me, and then swam towards me. I almost freaked out; I know it doesn’t sound that scary, and really I was more fascinated than anything, but how often do you cavort with actual wild animals, of any kind? Not that turtles are “wild” in the sense of “Wild Thing” or “Born to be Wild,” but you know what I mean. Animals, in their natural state, on their turf, with me in silly swim trunks, a leaky mask, and stumpy little fins. And no upper body strength. Man, when a turtle swims, it’s like he’s flying through the water, flapping his fins like wings, and totally hauling ass. Fortunately they weren’t aggressive at all. They seemed more like dignified old men. (And/or women. How do you tell the sex of a turtle?)

The least touristy island, Molokai, really felt like another country. You’re not allowed to just head over, not that I have any idea how you’d get there anyway. Instead, once a day there’s a chartered boat for tourists, and to board it you have to pre-purchase the guided island tour. The reason is, Molokai is a former leper colony, and in recompense for marooning lepers there, the US government has agreed to give them their privacy and support them on the island until the last of them has died off. (Meanwhile, they’re finally allowed to leave if they want.) The island is largely undeveloped and overgrown, not manicured like the more touristy islands. Mongooses were running around everywhere. The guy giving our tour was really cool. His handshake felt odd because two fingers were permanently curled in.

The Landlord [my then-stepdad] had insisted that we use his tent for the trip, even though the one my wife and I used throughout our bike tour was totally great (and after all those months I could set it up in five minutes flat in the dark). Still, the Landlo’s fancy-pants tent might have been just the thing—had the poles been included. It turns out that for some reason he stored the poles separately, and forgot to give us the second bag, so they didn’t make the trip with us. If you’ve never tried to use a tent without poles, well, let me tell you, you’d be better off with nothing at all. The tent was utterly useless. Like a giant straightjacket. Not waterproof in the slightest, of course. When it rained (which seemed like half the time), it was just a total joke, as if Paul Bunyan saw us getting rained on and just dropped a giant Kleenex over us.

So yeah, Hawaii was great but we were honestly pretty stoked to get back into a home. We missed little things like an address, a roof over our heads, electric lights, a real bed, and an income. I suppose the trip had been just what we needed, because before we left we’d despised the pressures and responsibilities of full-time jobs. But so far, we’re still glad to be back—but only because we did have the experience of escaping for a while. During the tour, we were routinely struck by how many people we met who lamented, “I could never afford to do that! What about your jobs? What about the car payments? The mortgage? The kids?” We also met several people who had actually done the same thing, and who were ecstatic to see that other people had also found an opportunity to travel before it was too late.

I’ve been pulling some weekend shifts at the bike shop in Berkeley (where I worked as a college kid), to get some money rolling in and more importantly the psychological boost of feeling like we’re not just burning through what’s left of our savings. Beyond that, our first order of business was been finding an apartment (our first one together!) so during the first week back we threw ourselves headlong into an intense housing search. It wasn’t long before we found a really great apartment. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t take us as tenants, even though we both have spotless credit ratings and a pile of cash, because we weren’t gainfully employed. Seems like a catch-22; how do you get a job without a home? Camp in the park and put a suit on in the morning? So we bailed on that place and found another, which we liked even better and had cheaper rent. This time we knew what we were doing, and “informed” them of my highly lucrative managerial job at the bike shop. I’d checked with my old boss there, to make sure it was okay to tell this little white lie, and to my surprise he actually offered me the very job I’d pretended to have. So my application was almost honest, the only fiction being that I pretended I’d accepted the job and was actually working. Can I still sleep at night, having fibbed like this? Well, what about the fully employed guy who’s about to lose his job, whether he knows it or not? What’s the  difference? The property management company’s insecurity is not my problem.

So frantic was our urge to move into the apartment that we hardly checked out the neighborhood beforehand. We moved in at night, and were completely exhausted afterward. Before turning in I had to park the 14-foot U-Haul we’d rented, and in the process got to drive it up one of the very steepest hills in San Francisco—that is to say, one of the steepest hills on planet Earth. That was a bizarre sensation: I felt that any minute the truck could tumble over backwards and I would bounce all the way into the ocean. Only at the top did I see the sign stating “TRUCKS PROHIBITED.” Needless to say, parallel parking that beast was not easy.

The next morning, we strolled around our new neighborhood for the first time. We’d assumed, based on the rather reasonable rent in this notoriously expensive city, that we would be in a sketchy neighborhood. To our surprise and delight, we discovered we’d landed in a very nice area. It’s in Russian Hill, walking distance from North Beach, Chinatown, the Marina, and Pacific Heights. Our street (we’re on the corner of Polk and Filbert, if you happen to know where that is) has cute little shops and restaurants up and down it. We even have an old-fashioned, elegant movie theater, but it’s currently showing “Judge Dredd” (no thanks). Perhaps the best find is a fantastic Italian restaurant within walking distance. It has hideous art on the walls, like a still life of a wine bottle with an actual cork glued to it, which we’re guessing helps disrupt the ambience, thus keeping the prices down. I have a feeling we’ll be eating there a lot, even as we try to save to buy some real estate somewhere someday.

It’s a sunny Sunday morning and we’re sitting in a little bakeshop called Beppie’s Pies. Or maybe it’s Bepple’s. We bought some large, sweet, cakey blueberry muffins, which should pay our rent here for a while. We’re the only ones in the place, perhaps due to godawful music they’re playing; the current song is the dreadful wailing of some woman who is missing her man since he left. She’s somehow injecting little staccato pauses into her wails, kind of like how a TV evangelist drags “Jesus” out into three syllables. 

Tonight we’ve been invited to a barbecue, but by people who seldom barbecue. In fact, they had originally planned for me to be in charge of the grill. Fortunately, I was informed of my duties sufficiently far in advance that I could beg the host to reconsider, and explain my total incompetence in such things. Not that I don’t like to eat barbecue; I just don’t crave it often enough to learn how to do it, and buy the gear, etc. My friend P—, over in Berkeley, routinely host barbecues (well, at least he did in the couple years preceding our bike tour; I hope he still does). His parents are from Germany, and are in fact professional barbecuists. He always makes this German-style cole slaw (or “cold slaw” as my brothers and I used to ignorantly call it) that’s as good as anything that comes off the grill. For such events, I usually buy a cut of meat with a name something like “Swiss boot steak.” It looks as impressive as your best cut of expensive meat, so I give the semblance of a true beef aficionado, but this stuff is so dirt-cheap I feel like the butcher would just give it to me if I asked nicely. Needless to say, it’s as tough as leather. I’m reminded of the TV commercials for the Ginsu steak knives. Not that I watch much TV (E—and I don’t have one) but this commercial—perhaps you’ve seen it—has been on for so long it practically has a cult following. I’ll attempt to quote from memory:

These fantastic Ginsu knives never need sharpening! Watch: we’ll cut through this tin can, and then—look!—it still cuts through this leather boot like a hot knife through butter! You get the cleaver, the butcher, the serrated breader, and the 12 steak knives for only $19.95, that’s $19.95, plus shipping and handling. But wait, there’s more: if you act now, you also get the bonus fillet knife and the EZ-matic mandolin! It slices, it dices, and look! Before, you had a potato—now you’ve got curly fries! Call now, operators are standing by at 1-800-228-2200, that’s 1-800-228-2200!

And why does a steak knife need to be able to cut through a boot? Because it might get used on a Swiss steak! Really, this slab of chewy gristle is more of a garnish for me than anything, since I’m really there for the socializing and the cold slaw. Besides, calamari is very chic and it’s as tough as rubber. And since I don’t bother to chew any of my other food, what’s wrong with working my jaws once in a while? 

I get to have some fun with the Swiss steak even before I eat it. You see, when you barbecue in Berkeley, you invariably get a few vegans who almost act offended at the sight of meat—never mind that they’re at a barbecue and presumably knew full well what they were getting into. Also never mind that their tempeh patties are only afforded what little flavor they have by the beef fat they’ve managed to absorb from the grill. I typically let my boot-steak snuggle up against the tempeh, maybe even overlap it bit. The vegans get really pissy about this. You’d think the steak was poison. I emphasize the ideological aspect of the situation as I soothe them: “Look, it doesn’t count as animal cruelty of you yourself didn’t select the meat. You’re still innocent. Cruel fate brought the meat into your life, against your will.” This goes over reasonably well, especially if the vegan has had enough beer.

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Marriage Hacks - When Love Isn’t Enough

Introduction

Right off the bat, this post doesn’t really provide hacks per se. I was just trying to get your attention. Also, the point of “when love isn’t enough” isn’t a critique of your, my, or any marriage. In my opinion, love alone is never enough. That’s kind of my whole point.

This post is about what I’ve learned during 31 years of marriage. My cred in offering any kind of advice is based on a) my wife actually having suggested this post, which indicates she doesn’t consider me a total disaster as a husband, and b) the probability that if you asked my kids about the state of my marriage, they wouldn’t burst out laughing or stalk away glowering and/or muttering “no comment.” If you are humble enough to think you might learn something from me, read on. This might be a good post if you’re a young person contemplating marriage, a married person looking to glean some tips, a single person looking to bask in all the work you don’t have to do, or a bored person stuck in a long line.

A few caveats

Before we begin, here are a few disclaimers. First, I’m not going to provide any advice about how to find love, learn to love, or fall in love. I honestly don’t know how any of that works, having (long ago) stumbled into it by accident. (The closest posts to that topic which you’ll find on albertnet are here and here, or for a nice crash-and-burn story, here.) If you’re a frustrated single person wondering why I am making no attempt to address your situation, please accept my apologies that albertnet can’t be everything to everybody (though many of my posts are perfect for singles, like this one, this one, and this one).

Second caveat: I’m not a marriage counselor, I have no formal training, I’m not even an Internet influencer, and this blog has no Service Level Agreements. If you’ve ever asked a neighbor for tips on cleaning your barbecue grill, that’s the spirit you should bring to reading this post.

Finally, if you’re married or otherwise attached to a narcissist, psycho, jerk, or hopelessly selfish person, you need more advice than I could possibly offer and I recommend seeking professional help (counselor, lawyer, or assassin). (Yes, that last bit was a joke.) This post is about maintaining and/or improving a solid marriage, not fixing a broken one.

Hack #1: know what you’re in for

I think the Romance Industrial Complex has done a great disservice to the institution of marriage. Rom-coms always end when the cute guy and the cute girl finally stop with the combative high jinks, realize they’re actually in love, and kiss. If the movie kept going, it would morph into something between a boring documentary and a tense police procedural. I’m not saying marriage doesn’t have its high points, but it involves a lot more work than going on a date. You want proof? Imagine a meet-cute scenario ending in the proposal, “Would you like to get together this weekend and clean out my garage?” 

A marriage is like running a business, running a hotel, and sometimes running a war room. If kids are involved, it’s like running a daycare, a boarding school, and maybe even a prison. You and your spouse aren’t just maintaining a marriage, you’re also conducting your own adult lives, but in tandem. I mean, you’re tackling all the financial, emotional, logistical, and health-related issues everyone has to face, but in cooperation with another person whose challenges—and strategies—overlap with your own to a greater or lesser degree. This can be a big help, but it’s also hard to orchestrate. Your partner’s values, decisions, and behavior are directly tied to just about every important aspect of your adult life.

Here’s an analogy: suppose you love cycling, because of the scenery, the exercise, and the speed. If you fly to France and rent a bike from a chichi tour outfit (as I once got to do), you get all the enjoyment without much hassle. You might descend an Alpine pass in a downpour and wear down your rental’s brake pads, get its drivetrain filthy, etc. and then all you have to do is give the bike over to the mechanic at the end of the day, and when you set out again the next morning it’ll be good as new. That’s a lot like going a date … no wonder new love is so awesome! You’re on a weekend getaway where other people are cooking and cleaning for you … you might even have a whole orchestra playing for you so you don’t have to talk! But dating doesn’t “scale,” as the business people would put it.

Getting back to the bike analogy, if you love cycling enough to drop a few grand on a racing bike, you’re going to have to maintain that bike yourself. If you don’t service the drivetrain regularly, the chain and cassette cogs will stop working so well, make a lot of noise, and wear out too soon. If you keep ignoring this maintenance, the chain may eventually break, likely while under heavy load, meaning you could crash. If you don’t inspect the tires often enough, you could have a sudden blowout. So you need to learn how to clean and lube your drivetrain, ideally how to mount tubeless tires with that messy goo, and how to inspect everything for wear and tear, and none of this bears any resemblance to enjoying scenery and speed, getting fresh air and exercise, and everything else that drew you to the sport in the first place. But if you want to be able to enjoy the ride, you have to put up with the maintenance.

So it is with marriage: you’re constantly communicating with your partner, mending fences when you disappoint each other, looking to make sure one another’s needs are met, and deciding together how to handle important decisions. The initial attraction, with its spirit of fun, chemistry, and romance may have gotten you here, but it’s a whole other skill set you need to develop to keep the marriage running. Resign yourself to this reality, commit to it, understand that the effort is well worth it, and be grateful that you have a marriage worth maintaining.

Hack #2: get help

Here’s a pretty typical sob story: boy meets girl, they date, they marry, they encounter the inevitable challenges of marriage, they wing it, they do what comes naturally (e.g., indulge in selfishness), that doesn’t work, they fight, they grow apart, they divorce. I’ve had front-row seats for this four times (that being the number of divorces across my two parents). That scenario played out with my wife’s parents as well. In fact I’m sure it happens all the time. Perfectly reasonable people fall in love, marry, wing it, and fall short.

I’m not saying everyone needs marriage counseling. That can become necessary after too much neglect, if things are starting to break down, but it’s never too early to get non-professional help, whether it’s from friends, families, books, articles, whatever. I love the idea of the Catholic Pre-Cana consultation, where a priest or other official reaches out to an engaged couple and leads them through a workshop on communication, conflict resolution, finances, intimacy, and family planning before the marriage even starts. (If I have any of that wrong, I still love the idea as I’ve represented it, whether anybody practices it or not.) I talk about marriage with my friends, and it’s not all just grousing. And I read books and articles about it, and talk to my wife about it, and just generally take marriage seriously as a difficult discipline that requires a lot of skill and effort. This is as sensible to me as watching a YouTube video about how to bleed the hydraulic brakes on my bike. And if life throws a hard enough curve ball, I’m happy to get marriage counseling, just like I’ll take my bike to a shop to have the shock-absorbing fork rebuilt from time to time.

Hack #3: hone your communication

Continuing the thread about doing what comes naturally, consider this quote from the writer Lore Segal (taken from a telegram sent by a character in her novel Her First American):

PROTOCOL IS THE ART OF NOT REPEAT NOT LIVING BY NATURAL HUMAN FEELING

The romantic ideal tells us that love—that most fundamental of natural human feelings—is enough. But humans can be complicated, unreliable, and self-interested, none of which is very romantic or conducive to marital tranquility. When we do screw up, most of the time it’s communication, not action, that helps us make amends. Sure, if you drop a vase on the floor you can just sweep up the shards and, if needed, replace the vase. But if you accidently hurt your partner’s feelings, things are more complicated. You have to understand his or her feelings; understand your role in them; understand what else may be contributing (e.g., your partner’s past and any triggers or hang-ups that might introduce); understand what your partner needs; and figure out how to provide that. This can be very difficult when we’re stubborn, confused, defensive, and/or our own feelings are also hurt. Often times this leads to a fight. Marital arguments, I think, can be the most charged ones we face, because with friends or colleagues there’s not so much passion involved, and you don’t have to go to bed with the person that night, and wake up with him or her the next day. With marriage, everything is at stake, or so it feels.

Saying the wrong thing is only one kind of miscommunication. Biting your tongue too often or otherwise failing to communicate is another. Or, saying the right thing wrong, and/or at the wrong time. Communication can be a minefield, which makes it a prominent use case for getting help, and not waiting until you’re in the thick of a crisis to do so. I’m talking about making a habit of reading about relationships, whether it’s fiction, self-help books, advice articles … whatever you come across. Be like a decorator crab scuttling along the ocean floor keeping an eye out for anything that might be a handy accoutrement.

Case in point: I came across this New York Times article, “8 Phrases to Help Your Relationship Thrive,” and found it well worth reading. In case you don’t subscribe to the Times and have exhausted your pay-wall freebies, the phrases tend to deal with either the struggle to conduct the argument constructively (e.g., “Can we slow down?” and “Let me try that again”) or a shift in perspective (e.g., “What does the relationship need from us right now?”). Reading the article reminded me of conversations I’ve had with my wife around the art of marital dialogue, so I emailed her the link. Imagine my surprise when she misconstrued the purpose of my email and thought I was hinting at ways she could improve. In her defense, it probably wasn’t wise of me to title the email, “Read it and weep, bitch!”

No, of course I didn’t do that. Just making sure you’re awake. But the reality is, communication can be hard no matter how much you practice, and how skillful a communicator you normally are, or how good your intentions are. Part of the problem is that you cannot always (or even usually) predict the brain space your spouse/other may be in when you decide to communicate.

I want to get back to the concept of protocol now. I think computer networks make a great analogy here—so bear with me when this gets a bit arcane. You’re reading this blog right now thanks to the work of countless nerds designing electronic communication protocols: HTTP, TLS, HTML, and TCP, to name a few. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need a security protocol like TLS any more than we’d need bike locks. But TCP—Transmission Control Protocol—is instrumental in making the Internet work. It basically achieves, on a network level, what several of the Times article’s eight phrases do. It makes sure the communication works properly, even when network conditions are poor (e.g., in cases of a weak or congested connection).

You may be wondering why I dragged you through all that. Here’s the point: TCP does a great job of handling poor conditions. Its operation is perfectly logical and consistent. It adapts to  congestion or noise by dynamically slowing down the communication, such as by negotiating a smaller “window size” (i.e., telling the other device, “I can accept up to X bytes of data before you must stop and wait for an ACK”). The worse the connection gets, the more steps TCP takes to make sure data isn’t corrupted, to the point that this protocol almost never fails (though it may slow the network down if, say, you’re on WiFi in the kitchen and the microwave is running). In this way, TCP is basically the opposite of how humans communicate.

How’s that? Well, when we get upset, and feel attacked, we can often have a fight-or-flight reaction, because as sophisticated as our brains are, they don’t differentiate between threats to our life and threats to, say, our sense of self. If things get sufficiently heated, our “lizard brains” take over in what’s called “limbic override” such that logic, sensitivity, and consideration go right out the window. This is how marital spats can turn so nasty, and if they lead to residual resentment, the next fight is bound to be worse, and if this persists the relationship can be irreparably damaged.

This is why we need to learn about communication, think hard about it, work hard at it, and respect it. It’s the best tool we have but handling it well during duress does not come naturally. It takes practice, forethought, and dedication. Find your inner TCP.

Hack #4: be humble

When I advise “be humble” I’m not referring to the simple act of not bragging even when you could. I’m talking about putting your relationship before your ego. Most people wouldn’t admit to putting their egos first, but lots of people do it as a reflex.

Perhaps this started with David Letterman. I liked his show back in the ‘80s, found him funny, and I suppose let his arch, sarcastic, and reckless style influence my own behavior. It was all very mimetic: I didn’t just want to watch his show and laugh at his wisecracks; I wanted to be ironic and cool, like him. In my defense, I was just a dumb teenager, and had very little to lose. My friends were just as enamored with acerbic wit as I was, and on some level we probably all know it was a pose. But it became a habit, and not just for us. I think society started to be snide. It’s like everybody was afraid to be earnest.

You can see this reflected in advertisements. They used to tout the benefits of a product, like this typewriter ad:

When’s the last time you saw a ad that straightforward and sincere? Modern ads consider product features and benefits to be beside the point; instead, the point is how cool you will be if you use the product. With this mimetic yearning and forced nonchalance so prevalent in the culture, perhaps it’s inevitable to see people being too cool to read self-help books or articles, like they’re just so far above it.

I suppose I should back that up. On a hunch, I sifted through the reader comments to the Times article on useful relationship phrases. Needless to say I found a bunch of snotty, dismissive ones, such as these three:

Twice we’ve had to waste hundreds of dollars paying a referee (sorry, counselor) when she folded her arms and wouldn’t talk anymore. When did people get so weak that they can’t deal with a little stumbling around in a conversation while working things out?

This pablum is one of the reasons why “couples therapy” and “marriage counseling” are expensive wastes of time.

Frankly I’d laugh if my wife said this—or most of this jargon—to me.

How would you like to be married to one of these guys? Sure, they probably seemed really cool during the courting period, but they don’t seem to take delicate communication very seriously. That first guy, by his own admission, didn’t get a very positive reaction from his wife and I can see why. But even if we assume these assholes’ marriages are fine, and that their attitudes and practices work just fine for them and their wives, why do they take the trouble to pooh-pooh the Times article with their snide comments, despite the fact so many other readers have left largely positive comments? My guess: these blowhards are just too weak and insecure to admit they could improve, and have some perennial need to showcase their coolness to the world.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not Doogie Howser, and still enjoy making wisecracks (though the sarcasm of my youth has generally softened to facetiousness). Much of my communication with my wife is lighthearted, flippant, and unguarded. I get it that not all conversation needs to be mired in complex protocol. (To continue the network analogy, not everything is TCP; plenty of Internet data is sent using the lighter-weight UDP protocol which is best-effort. Thus, when I’m pattering away to my wife about bike rides or beer or whatever, I mark my packets discard-eligible and set the window size to infinity.) But my point is, a responsible marriage partner needs to be willing to be earnest, and to risk seeming uncool. Particularly in times of duress, when it’s tempting to be dismissive, being sincere instead of cavalier doesn’t only serve the dialogue, but it’s an important gesture in and of itself.

My wife and I took great pains to impress all this upon our kids when they were teenagers (i.e., at the age where everything is stupid and unnecessary and annoying). Obviously our daughters had front row seats to our own arguments from time to time, but beyond that we resorted to old-fashioned instruction. My wife found this great book, Crucial Conversations – Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, and for what felt like at least a year, she’d bring it out at least once a week at the dinner table after the dishes were cleared away (by our kids, I might add) but before everybody scattered. We’d make the kids take turns reading passages aloud, and then we’d all discuss them. This went over about as well as serving lentils at a wedding. You’ve never seen so much eye-rolling or heard so much groaning. Our girls absolutely hated this family tradition, and to make matters worse, they couldn’t resist citing their sister’s gaffs and missteps as case studies in our discussions. This frequently led to heated battles and mutual character assassination, fanning the fires of the sibling rivalry that smolders in every family. It was almost a mockery of the skills my wife and I were trying to instill, but I have to believe some of the lessons were at least partially absorbed, and—most importantly—through this practice we modeled earnestness and sincerity. If you asked either daughter if her parents take communication seriously, I’m sure she’d say yes. And it hasn’t escaped their notice that we fight fair, both with each other and with them. 

Hack #5: clean the grill

Make sure the grill is off and cool enough to handle safely, but still slightly warm ( as this helps loosen residue). For gas grills, turn off the propane and disconnect if necessary. Use a grill brush or scraper, and perhaps even a putty knife, to remove charred food and grease from the grates. For stubborn buildup, soak the grates in warm, soapy water for 15–30 minutes.

I’ll bet you thought “clean the grill” was going to be a metaphor! Naw. I just thought five hacks was a nice, round number, plus I’d mentioned barbecue grills above, as you’ll perhaps recall, though that must seem like hours ago. I hasten to add that I don’t actually know anything about barbecue grills. I stole those directions from the Internet and cannot vouch for them. But never mind, you’ve finally made it to the end. Thanks for reading, and feel free to share your own advice below.

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