You can't spell paint without AI

I’m finally getting around to a home improvement project I’ve been planning for close to forever. I’m painting our entire mudroom, which we call “the cave” (because it’s like a cave), with chalkboard paint so we can properly treat it like a cave. 

So, yesterday, I finally (read in 11-year-old’s voice) go to the local Ace hardware store to purchase the paint. I ask for help from the person at the cash wrap who calls up the designated paint person who meets me at the paint. I tell her my plan. She looks around hard, high and low, for the paint and finds only two quarts in stock. I want to know if this will be enough to do the job. I rattle off the dimensions of the cave and say it’s basically like a bathroom. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know off the top of her head how to think about how much paint a person needs, even roughly, even a guesstimate. This is new for me. Every paint person I’ve ever encountered knows these things. But this one goes onto her computer and Googles it. She twists the screen so I can read along with her, pointing her finger at the AI overview, and reads the paint amount estimation guidelines from AI. I say, “That could be what some guy wrote on reddit or it could be completely made up nonsense and we can never know. What if you go to the manufacturer’s website and get their guidelines?” She replied, off-balance, “I always just Google it. It’s fine.” That’s when it hit me. People have just unconsciously transitioned from Googling to reading the AI overview all the while believing it’s the same thing. She was old enough to know the old way. She doesn’t care or realize. She had no idea what I was talking about when I said those things about reddit and nonsense. 

That’s when I got away from her. Not necessarily on purpose, but because there happened to be a chalkboard paint enthusiast and expert shopping there, right then when I was, and he was dying to tell me everything he knew about applying it (he had done it many times) and to extoll all the greatness that will come to our home for having it. He was an endless source of tips and encouragement. He was a funster and I forgot all about the little confrontation I had provoked with the paint person. I didn’t take it any further with her.

But what I took from that encounter will go into future ones. And there will be future ones, trust me! I’m a college professor! I’m on the front lines with generative AI and it is existential hell and I have just, by pure luck, had a half-year sabbatical just when the battle tried to take me out (it literally put me in the hospital… no I’m not being a drama queen), and I feel ready to return and fight fight fight in the Fall semester. 

Anyway, what I took from my encounter at the hardware store is this: generative AI is not responsible or accountable and that is maybe a small problem when it comes to estimating paint amounts but it is a big problem if you consider the meaning or the consequences, broadly. 

If I’m going to follow guidelines to determine how much paint to purchase (and this, by the way, is something I want very much to do so that I know how much paint to purchase), then I want the source to be accountable and therefore to be responsible, somehow. I want a source, period. There is no such thing with generative AI. If it gets it wrong, there is no one who is wrong, there is nothing I can do if it is sit with being wrong, myself, for having used wrong AI generated information. On the other hand, if I follow the manufacturer’s guidelines and they turn out to be wrong, then I can let them know and/or I can never purchase their product again. And they, a business who wants to have customers, have an incentive to be correct (about some things at least), so I am not risking much by taking their word for it. 

This is all part of our social contract but AI, not being human, has imposed itself into society without participating in the social contract. This is outrageous. Literally outrageous. Outrage is, or should be, what more of us personify at this moment.

But not enough people realize or care that generative AI is taking advantage of our untrained minds, lack of respect (or understanding) of sources of information, and just fallibility/idiocy and, as a result, generative AI will create even more idiocy, which means it will have even more power to enshittify our daily lives from something as small as buying paint to things as large and nightmarish as I don’t want to type them here on The Mermaid’s Tale today. 

This was one of the first times I’ve tussled with generative AI outside of the hellish educational context and so, unburdened by all the moral angst I feel on campus, it was enlightened, if you want to call it that. This paint person had not been trained to know how to estimate paint amounts for customers. Her employer doesn’t care enough about her to train her to be an expert. She probably doesn’t care enough to learn how to be an expert, herself, because her employer doesn’t pay her enough to want to do such a thing, or to even think to do such a thing. If you aren’t paid enough, then not only do you not want to do more than you’re paid for at your job, but you sure don’t want to do any more than you have to for your shitty boss and the shitty corporation who don’t pay you enough. You have no incentive to maintain, let alone improve, the quality of the outfit because you’re not proud of it, you’re not part of it. Besides, why be a person in the world, paint or otherwise, when you can just “Google” your thinking for you. 

The paint person who consulted AI said two quarts should be enough.