By the time you read this, my friend Dave will have had a hip replacement. Last week he asked Stefan and me to join him at a corner tavern for a last outing before his scheduled surgery. Over two pitchers of beer and a large tray of unshelled peanuts, Dave, Stefan, and I discussed a myriad of subjects. I learned more than I wanted to know about joint replacements. We wondered why marijuana-laced drinks in Wisconsin are legal when marijuana gummies are not. We discovered that we all lived in Minneapolis at the same time during the 1980s.
Late in the evening I asked whether either of them ever use ChatGPT. Stefan said that he now uses it almost exclusively. In his opinion, the information on ChatGPT is more reliable than either Google or Safari, and it is now his primary search tool.
He then opened his phone to show me a photo of his front yard. Except it wasn’t his front yard. It was an AI-generated image of what his front yard would look like if he wanted to improve the property’s curb appeal. A few things on the house itself had been changed (i.e., a new front door, different trim on the windows), but the most noticeable alteration was a mulched flower garden in the center of his lawn.
“I uploaded a photo of my front yard,” Stefan said, “and ChatGPT redesigned it for me. I’m thinking about making some of the changes.”
That night after I got home I was too awake to go straight to bed, so I ChatGPTed my front yard. The image it produced took the railing off my front porch, replaced my old Adirondack chairs with less battered outdoor furniture, and removed one of the bushes from the front of the house. It also added a mulched garden in the exact spot where a big chunk of my lawn had died the previous winter. AI may have noticed my feeble attempts at reseeding and chose to replace damaged turf with flowers and ground cover.
The next morning I showed the image to Manyu and told her that I wanted to put in the garden. Her reply was immediate and emphatic. “Before you do anything to the front yard,” she said, “clean up the jungle in the back.”
Manyu’s point was valid. If I wasn’t taking care of the mulched garden that I already have, why would I create a new one? I immediately went to work on our backyard. I trimmed, maybe over-trimmed, three bushes that had grown to twice their preferred size. I pulled weeds until my compost pile overflowed with yard waste. I transplanted a dozen perennials, moving tall plants to the back and moving short plants to the front. I dug up a large clump of chives from our flower garden and put it in our vegetable garden. I even asked my next door neighbor if I could trim his mulberry tree where it drooped over the fence onto our property.
With yard work comes minor injuries. My garden gloves are in my back pocket more often than they’re on my hands, so I am especially susceptible to small cuts and scrapes. I’d already nicked one finger with a pruning saw and put a couple of rose thorns in my palm when I unwittingly dug the blade of a round-point garden shovel directly into the heart of an underground wasp nest. It’s a wonder of nature how these normally unaggressive hive of insects transform themselves into a unified killing machine when a person messes with their home.
I had to make a dash for the house, unaware I had wasps in my hair and in the weave of my wool jacket. Only after shaking out my hair and tossing my jacket back outside was I able to assess the damage to my exposed skin. I had two stings on my face, one on my right hand, and somewhere between six and eight on my left hand. I don’t remember, but I may have used my dominant left hand to brush wasps away from my face.
My first thought after assessing my injuries was that my left hand really hurt, my face and right hand not so much. My second thought was that I’ve probably been stung by individual wasps or bees forty or fifty different times over the years, but this was my first swarm attack. My third thought was that none of this would have happened had I stayed away from ChatGPT.
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