Artificial Intelligence
I’ve been a reporter for a decade, and, let me tell you, has everybody got a story for you. Everybody’s pitching. People also love to say—for instance, on a date—, “Why don’t you tell me something that’s not in the article?”
“Cedar Rapids, Iowa smells like cereal,” I say, fresh from the campaign trail. “The Quaker Oats plant is there. So the whole town smells of raw oats. The air’s a little sweet, or tangy—kind of like yeast.”
Then there was the time I was on a bus of socialists. They were headed to door-knock and canvass, en route to a state not their own. I was along for an article. When the bus broke down and we were stranded, the socialists began talking with the bus’s driver, a stoic, calm-eyed woman. An hour ‘til the mechanic would arrive. The young men (they were mostly men) wanted to know—and they were polite, curious—whether the woman “had a plan for election day.” The driver said she did not plan to vote. It emerged that this was not a problem of logistics—childcare, say, or transit to the polls. One young man after another asked her why. She wouldn’t say. Some back and forth. Finally, an admission. Not without pride, the driver told them she did not plan to vote because she did not participate in worldly government. God was her regent in the Kingdom of Heaven and on earth, she said, and she would have no other kings before him. The young men let her be.
In the newsroom, they’re training us on how to use the new AI chatbots. They’re good with generating different forms of writing—professional emails, Freedom of Information Act 1 requests, sonnets, sestinas. Between interviews, I ask the bot to write me limericks, on topics light and serious.
One afternoon, feeling lonely in my life, I request one about a person who is “single and childless.” I expect—I don’t know what. Something sad, frankly. The bot types out:
There once was a person so free
Who lived life so happily
No person to wed
No children to be fed
Living solo, with glee, they agree.
This, admittedly, makes me smile.
After work, I meet up with Ruth. We chat about our mutual friend Henry and the new woman he’s been seeing.
“What have you heard about her?” I ask, protective.
“Unfortunately, I’ve never heard a bad word against her.”
On the culture desk, a reporter is profiling women artists. At the end of each interview, she asks each one, “How is your life different from your mother’s?” Every subject, without exception, gasps.
A long weekend. I visit my father in the Hudson Valley.
“The mountains are looking good,” I say, absorbing his unclouded view.
“We had some work done over the summer.”
“Spruced them up for me?”
“Routine maintenance.”
After dinner, as he washes pots and pans, I take up a position beside him at the sink with a dish towel.
“I don’t dry dishes,” my father says, turning each bowl upside-down on the draining rack. He waves me away. “That’s what God is for.”
“What’s going on in poetry world?” I’m asking a friend who’s a poet and an adjunct, at the party.
“Metaphors are no longer in vogue.”
Leon, my roommate, walks up and joins us.
“People don’t want imagistic language to stand for anything other than itself?” “Right, because what are you trying to hide?”
“Aren’t all words metaphors for the signified?”
“Help,” says Leon to a stranger passing by. He takes the unknown man by the arm, pulling him into our group in the kitchen.
Recently, Ruth told me about something she knew to be love. Two of her friends, married for some years, at last had a much-wanted child. The baby was born premature and would have to sleep on the mother’s chest, doctor’s orders, for warmth and strength, for at least a night. This after a stint in the ICU. Exhausted and weak, the mother had to use the bathroom before she’d be able to rest, but the tiny baby would or could not be parted from her. Together then, all three of them—mother, father, and infant—moved to a narrow bathroom, the father holding the baby against the mother’s chest while she sat on the toilet and tried and strained to make a bowel movement. The three of them, in the closet of a room, keeping each other well and alive, Ruth said. Clutching and trembling and embracing, over a hospital shit. Love.
That Cedar Rapids campaign trail summer, I went out with a screenwriter. There was a glamorous party, and we danced, and smoked, and looked out at the city from a balcony. Then, tipsy and buzzed, we elevator-ed down and walked out from under the awning, across the street, into Central Park, where we lay down on the grass.
There were dog-walkers, then fireflies, then stars. In the darkness, we stood and strolled to a boulder, where I thought we’d be above rats or raccoons. I wore a dress and was bare-armed. He wore a suit, then shirtsleeves, his jacket on my shoulders. Atop the rock, lit by windows from the avenue and streetlamps, we kissed. He pulled away.
“This is so romantic,” he said.
My face changed, and he saw it.
“Oh, it’s okay,” said the Hollywood man. “We can break the fourth wall. We’re writers—we do that.”
“I’m not that kind of writer,” I said.
“Yes, you are.”
“Love isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something you make,” Saul tells me on the phone.
The chatbots are learning faster and faster. From context, now, they can tell right away whether a bank refers to a financial institution or to the side of a river.