thecounterintuitivekitchen

The other day, at a presentation, an artist¹ described images created by artificial intelligence as “ingrained with violence” and AI products in general as the “spiritless disembodiment of the internet gone mad.”

Here are two real things that I actually touched – pineapples and anemones (both at Robin Hollow Farm and Flowers). I did not realize that anemones are so dreamy, or know that pineapples could grow this way, in a pot! I share them so you are armed with a palate cleanser if you need one going forward.

Back to the artist’s talk: on a large screen, he projected AI images prompted by a string of words that he used, somewhat casually, to describe himself. AI processed the prompts into products: humanish creatures with tentacles and claws, clown makeup, eyes that seemed to lack perceivable boundaries, and turkey wattles. Even the Audubon Society, in explaining what a turkey wattle is, says “Take a close look at a male Wild Turkey—if you dare,” because its wattle is red, flappy, floppy, warty-looking, used to release heat, and capable of glowing scarlet when the turkey is courting or turning blue when a predator appears. It’s essentially a diseased-looking neck-penis.

When the AI image of the human-clown-turkey-calamari appeared, I had just pulled a wad of tightly compressed turkey out of a free sandwich (lunchtime presentation) and shrouded it with a paper napkin. The artist had given notice that a parade of grotesque things was coming at us, but even before I gazed upon the large wattle, it seemed like the turkey (as cold cuts) had been vacuum-packed and was functioning as a lap refrigerant. I gnawed on some bread that had bracketed the turkey as the talk unfolded. May I give you some advice? Never eat while looking at AI-generated imagery. Despite feeling more lucid about how AI functions (it condemns us and our codes by spitting the violence of our labels back at us, the artist said), I was queasy all afternoon.

How we label things, even silently, seems to seep out into the world. At Easter, I made a “cake.” I had not planned to make one; I had planned to blow 80 bucks from a gift card my brother sent me on whatever the professionals at this place specializing in frozen desserts had to offer. But because I trusted the first thing the internet told me about business hours, I arrived after closing time on Saturday. So then I picked up a box of graham crackers and a half gallon of vanilla ice cream at a Walgreens and proceeded to alter their states of being with ambient temperature, a kitchen hammer, and a cake pan.

I don’t buy plastic wrap or plastic bags, so I made a casket out of the graham cracker box by ripping off its front panel and hammering the crackers, still in their wax packages, into crumbs. This mess (sans wax bags and box) I deposited into a bunch of melted butter. Then I pressed that mess into a cake pan. I squirted Hershey’s syrup over that while the ice cream melted, then smooshed the ice cream into the pan. Then I hosed it with more chocolate. Then I put it in the freezer and pretended I was in a canoe, going somewhere nice. Then I hammered some Butterfingers and sprinkled them on the “cake” without taking the pan out of the freezer. I began a low-key campaign of saying we didn’t really need Easter dessert because a lot of glamorous New York City chocolate was on our counter, plus we would have candy from the egg hunt.

The kitchen hammer is first and foremost a meat tenderizer, but typically I use it for other things. I save egg shells, bake them, and then attack them so they can become fertilizer for fruit-bearing plants like strawberries, lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes, and on roses and some succulents. I started doing this after watching the folks from North44ºfarmstead do it. If you follow their advice at 14:17, you would use a food processor.

Eventually I’ll do that, but for now, I fuck ’em up with a hammer so I can store the shell bits discreetly, in a box in a drawer. To say my family hates what I’m doing with the egg shells is to put it lightly. I have been shouted at about the smell of baking egg shells (it is not great), encouraged to throw them away or at least just compost them, which itself leads to an argument, fueled by teenaged certainty, that our countertop compost should not be on the counter and that we are so gross. The following frustrating video is what happens when I do what I want, but quietly, so no one knows:

But I am not ashamed of the egg situation, and I trust the farmers’ advice. I knew these folks before they lived in Maine, and they were responsible for some of the most beautiful things built out of wood in Providence. I have worked with and for executive directors of various things over the years, and the most competent executive director I have ever known, in areas tangible and intangible, described North44ºfarmstead’s Punk, up above, as someone who could “build a box around me while I’m trying to think about how to build a box.” Thus I will do what she, Punk, suggests.

The Easter cake I was ashamed of. I didn’t say so, because we had no other real option for dessert aside from candy, and because every single person at Easter dinner had heard me go on at length at one point or another about what’s wrong with my cooking. As dessert time approached, someone started calling the ice cream cake “Gillian’s Shame Cake” and that took on a life of its own and they were correct. Like the wad of turkey from my AI sandwich, I wanted to cover it with the shroud, not of Turin, but of Cranston. (That shroud would probably be made of sub sandwich wrappers.)

I don’t have a photo of the cake, but we ate it, despite the difficulty involved in getting a fork and knife through the crust. You know what would make sense here, compositionally? An AI-generated work responding to the prompt “Gillian’s Shame Cake.” But you know what doesn’t make sense? AI.

Numero uno: there is an advertisement I hear all the time for “hallucination-free” AI, meaning, the AI most people use is hallucinatory. So… don’t use it for writing your business stuff.

Numero dos but also the far more important point: AI, including the garbage generated by our curiosity as we type in shit like “Gillian’s Shame Cake,” uses so much fucking energy that by 2027 “the AI sector could consume between 85 to 134 terawatt hours each year,” or about the same as the annual energy demand of the Netherlands, The Verge reports, using calculations Alex de Vries, a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Among so many other things, our fossil fuel consumption has triggered ocean temperatures so high that a worldwide mass coral bleaching event is currently underway, meaning that marine animals all over the globe are dying. “The way to save them is to deal with greenhouse gas emissions,” according to Terry Hughes, a marine biologist at James Cook University in Australia in the Scientific American piece Earth’s Coral Reefs Face a New, Deadly Mass Bleaching. They Can Still Be Saved.

With the Easter cake, I didn’t really try to do a good job in the first place or salvage it after, but that is no way to live, right? I do try, all the time and with mixed success on the personal and broader level, to deal with greenhouse gas emissions. Below is my cake of exultation because we now have a zero emission EV car and heat pumps, which one day I hope will be powered by RI-generated offshore wind:

And next we have the cake of my Rhode Island General Assembly dreams, because there are some very good bills that could get my state on track to decarbonize if the House and Senate would pass them:

But this is where we are right now with that cake, ie., there is a lot of work to be done, and why is there a cake of cheese with a fork on the right. If you would like to help bake this cake, here is a good place to start.

1. Kai Franz, http://www.kaifranz.de ↩︎