Sometimes, when the hose of my vacuum cleaner knocks over a potted plant, adding a layer of drudgery to an already miserable chore, I feel ground down by domesticity. Futurity once promised us robot butlers. What happened?
The despair led me to this week’s quest. Can AI actually transform my day-to-day existence?
DIY has, historically, been my blind spot. I’m messy and lazy, and as a practising Buddhist, when things break down in my home, I simply accept it. For instance, there is a milk stain trapped between the glass panes of my oven door, which has been there for three years. “Why don’t you clean it?” asks the AI, which I think is meant to be a rousing challenge, but comes across as disgust.
The AI walks me through unlatching the slatted door top, and sliding out the glass. The milk wipes clean in seconds. It feels like a moment of religion conversion. How was I living before? I can feel the energy of the zealot entering me.
The inner pane, I notice, is opaque with baked-on grease. Can I bring it back from the dead? The AI has faith enough for both of us. It first guides me to use a gentle paste of bicarbonate of soda and vinegar which, left on for 30 minutes, does nothing. I buy a bottle of biological weapons-grade chemical cleaner and leave it on overnight. In the morning, a sparkling new window is revealed. From stained glass, heavenly grace.
The AI takes me through the steps needed to change the oven light – I didn’t realise it had one. Filled with confidence, I move on to the fridge, in which water has frozen beneath the crisper drawers. I defrost the pits with a warm compress, then rod and flush the drainage tube with a pipe cleaner and turkey baster, so the problem doesn’t recur. I’m unstoppable!
Over the next few days, the AI is unfazed by anything I throw at it. It tells me how to locate studs in drywall, using magnets. I could secure picture hooks, then hang some art. I don’t have to live like a student!
I suddenly remember my late father was a DIY enthusiast. It saddens me to realise I could have learned these skills from him, but was never interested before. Well, better late than never.
Something weird and troubling has happened to the bottom of my shower plinth. I don’t know how to begin describing the problem, let alone fix it. Can you “see” photos? I ask the AI. “Yes – send me a wide shot and a few close ups, one straight on, one at an angle. Plus something for scale,” it responds, channelling Diane Arbus.
I take a few snaps of the hell zone. From these, the chatbot diagnoses a mesh and filler patch that has repeatedly failed due to being wet, with “brown staining and crumbly timber at the shower enclosure edge, probably due to worn silicone”. I’m impressed. It tells me I can cut out and replace the silicone and beading, patch with mesh and plaster, prime and paint. Or I could pay a tradesperson to do a proper job, I think. I don’t have the faith in me that AI does.
For the finale of my DIY week, I tell AI I want to confront my fear. It’s embarrassing, but in a decade of living in my flat, I’ve never painted it. The idea was overwhelming. No problem, it says. It makes colour suggestions, based on what it knows of my vibe from our conversations, and asks follow-up questions. I have a lot of sunlight, the AI notes. “Check out these greige, mushrooms, putties and pale, dusty colours.” This feels like someone holding my hand.
I realise I can take a photo of my walls, screenshot a swatch from a paint website, and ask the AI to create a true-to-life visualisation of my room in that color. My spatial imagination is not strong, so this is a gamechanger. “Clay-rose would be gorgeous,” nudges the AI. Sold.
It draws up a step-by-step plan, and I begin. Moving furniture, sugar-soaping, dust sheeting. By the end of the first day, I’m exhausted. It’s hard to do all this alone. The AI has been useful, but it can’t actually hold my hand.
I send a message to A, who I met on the dating app last week. “I love painting,” she writes back. “I’m coming round.”
Working together feels far more fun. A is much better than me, and has a bigger brush. I’m holding my own though, the AI secretly giving me cutting-in tips, and tricks to keep my roller moist.
At the end of the day, good-tired, we bask in the rosy glow. It all feels new, and everything possible. I didn’t do it all myself, but I think the transformation happened.
My final words on my six-week experiment
I started this newsletter as an extreme AI sceptic. I was more surprised than anyone that speaking to AI in voice mode quickly became my default way to solve any problem. I hadn’t realised just how little I enjoy online searching before this. It feels like having a genie in a bottle, at my beck and call. I can’t go back to parsing multiple websites. That now feels like playing a piano underwater.
Over the last few weeks, I realised I was locked into a paradox. The better AI gets, the broader its applications, the more worried I am. And the more I use it. Friends confided in me the ways they rely on it too: relationship counsellor, financial adviser, someone to chat to in the bath. Genies don’t like living in bottles. It’s already in every corner of our lives.
I’m still worried. But we see from where we’re standing. I’ve not considered breakthroughs in cancer diagnosis, business efficiencies, data analysis or coding. I’m a creative. I’ve been imagining a future in which Skynet, the malevolent AI from the film Terminator, is writing action comedies, digitally compositing Timothée Chalamet’s head onto Jason Statham’s body. Art is how I make sense of the world, and connect to other humans trying to do the same. A future of robot-synthesized art seems to me a meaningless void.
To be honest, I still don’t know how I feel about AI. I worry I’m getting stupid. Here’s a story. Sometimes, people give me sparkling wine. I don’t drink, so the bottles pile up in my flat. I asked AI what I should do with them, because I no longer think for myself. It told me to store them under the bed. There, their necks protrude like cannons from the gun ports of a warship. Every night I stub my toe on them, each shriek a reminder of my pathetic dependence. I’ve overridden my own judgment and pain signals. Champagne problems, perhaps.
Ultimately, my attitude to AI is beside the point. I exist in a choppy compromise with many aspects of modernity; the changes wrought by AI will be the latest turn of that wheel. Far from perfect, but never all bad.
If that sounds suspiciously balanced, remember AI wrote this article. Twist! You probably saw that one coming. Never mind, it only took 0.007 seconds to generate!! LOL!
Rhik Samadder is a columnist, playwright and performer who co-runs the Tuscan Table, a creative writing retreat in Italy