The first text from Karen came in before lunch. She said she was hoping for some downtime. Marty’s came less than an hour later. He wanted me to know how much he loves serendipity on vacation. Neither text was long. Neither mentioned the eleven pages I had sent that morning, which is how I knew both texts were entirely about the eleven pages.
My document was titled The Amalfi-Basque Cooking Society. It was a plan for two couples to eat and cook their way through Italy and Spain over fourteen days after the summer chaos dies down.
It had a mission statement.
Each couple, it explained, would come home with two dishes and one appetizer they could host for the other couple within sixty days of returning. “We’re not consuming,” it said. “We’re collecting a repertoire.”
Sixty days. I gave my friends a deadline on a vacation they are paying for.
There was a shared notebook with five required daily entries. One of them was to be a funny line. Relax. Just be funny at least once a day for two weeks.
There was a section called “One Surprise” that specified the surprise had to be human. Whatever that means.
Each of us was to bring home one small, legal, packable item. Legal was apparently something that didn’t go without saying.
A restaurant in Getaria was designated “the emotionally right backup.” The final evening was partially scripted. Marty’s line, in quotation marks, would be “I’m in charge of vermouth hour.” Marty did not write that line. Marty has never said that sentence out loud in his life. I assigned it to him, in advance, in writing, like a man casting his friend in a play about himself.
Over the fourteen days, the document managed to fit in a fire-cooking pilgrimage, a private chef, a chartered boat, and two cooking classes. Then, apparently worried things were getting out of hand, it offered this advice.
“Don’t overstuff.”
In the Dates section, it winked at them. An actual emoticon, the only one in eleven pages, sitting there like the one friendly word in a ransom note.
I meant the whole thing as inspiration. Technically, it did inspire feelings.
The mash and the spirit
I run a small, increasingly inactive consultancy called The Distillery. I named it that because distilling is what I do. Someone hands me a gnarly problem with too many moving parts, and I hand back the three that matter, in language a person can actually act on.
I do the same thing to my family, with considerably less consent. When my parents needed a plan for part-time caregiving, I built one. Schools, houses, insurance, whatever comes up, somebody sends it my way. Sometimes they just need to complain about it within earshot. The family hands me the mash, I hand back the spirit. I have always been quietly proud of this.
Then artificial intelligence showed up and offered to make the mash for me, and I said yes without thinking very hard about what might happen next.
The machine and I settled into a division of labor I never consciously designed. It produced possibilities, caveats, contingencies, backup restaurants, packing philosophies and, as established, a constitution governing vermouth. I was still supposed to be the distiller.
Except the machine has no idea which nine of twelve pages I would normally throw away, so it keeps all twelve. Worse, it formats them beautifully. After eighty-five exchanges, the mash had headings, page numbers, and a mission statement. Eighty-five exchanges, and not one of them was with a person going on the trip.
There it was on my screen, looking finished enough that I forgot it wasn’t.
The map
Okay, time for a confession. I did not read the eleven pages. I skimmed them quickly, several times.
I was looking for contour, not details. How many days, where. Which activities seemed worth doing. Whether the routing made sense. How you get from a train in one country to a hotel in another without sacrificing half a day to airports. The document choreographed every minute of fourteen days, and I saw only the outline.
Somewhere around exchange seventy, the outline did exactly what I needed it to do. It showed me the strain in the routing, all those flights and connections and wasted mornings, and I made the decision the whole exercise had been building toward. Two regions in Italy instead of two countries. That felt better immediately.
Making these calls was my job, and I still think I nailed that part.
Then I sent the map.
Liz read Karen and Marty’s texts before I did. She read them once, which is generally all she needs. She told me to go read what I had sent, told me they had every right to be freaked out, and then said the sentence I have not been able to put down since.
“Imagine someone sent that to you.”
So I read it, for the first time as it turns out. There was the mission statement. The sixty-day deadline. The mandatory wit. The emotionally right backup. And there was Marty, in quotation marks, in charge of vermouth hour.
We do not drink vermouth. Nobody in this friendship has ever ordered vermouth beyond the splash in an occasional martini. We drink wine, whiskey, and tequila if it’s Taco Tuesday. The machine had invented a ritual for four people it had never met, and I had put my name on it and hit send.
Karen and Marty, meanwhile, had read the whole thing. Of course they had. It was addressed to them. They opened something that read less like an invitation than the operating manual of a small European republic and concluded, reasonably, that their friend Rob had annexed their vacation.
The call
We asked for the Zoom call. Liz and I wanted to start over, which you can still do if nobody has left the country or booked a flight.
I apologized early, which I recommend. Then I explained my process, which I do not. I told them the document was raw material, a midpoint, something I had generated so I could see all the possibilities and then cut most of them. Then, in what I thought was a completely reasonable tone, I explained that they were never supposed to read it.
Karen waited a beat.
“If we weren’t supposed to read it,” she said, “what were we supposed to do with it?”
I had nothing. Still don’t.
It took another call and a flurry of texts to get the four of us back to approximately where we had been the morning before the eleven pages. That is a poor return on eighty-five exchanges.
Eventually they understood what had happened. I had let Claude do a great deal of the data gathering, but I had never intended the eleven pages to be the answer. Somewhere along the way, I had gotten so comfortable treating machine output as raw material that I forgot normal people don’t receive eleven pages with section headers and think, Ah, raw material. They think their neurotic friend has planned every waking hour of their vacation.
I told them I was wrong to send it, which was true. Then I made a second promise. From now on, I would keep my use of the machine to myself.
That felt honorable for about five minutes.
What I had actually done wrong was send something I had not finished thinking through. Somehow I turned the whole episode into evidence that the machine itself was the embarrassing part. There is nothing wrong with a first draft. There is quite a lot wrong with sending one to your friends and presenting it as their vacation. Those are not the same problem.
Living under the treaty
Nevertheless, the promise became a treaty, and I have been living under its terms.
I gave up the em-dash. I have loved that mark my entire adult life. I did not stop because my views on punctuation suddenly changed. I stopped because the em-dash had been reclassified as evidence.
My sons are suspicious all the time now. If a message from me arrives too researched or too articulate, I get the look, which is irritating because I was researched and articulate before any of them could read. The trait predates the machine. Everyone in my life also knows I have too much time on my hands. The eleven-page vacation plan did not exactly reveal this. It ratified it.
It is a strange problem to acquire at sixty. For most of my life, being unusually prepared was merely annoying.
It is now forensic.
So I developed a workaround I am not proud of. Someone in the family asks me a question. I work it through with the machine and check the answer. Now I know the answer. Then I go to Google and find a website or YouTube video that says roughly the same thing, so I can send that instead.
The information has not changed. I have given it a fake mustache.
And now a process the machine reduced to two minutes takes twenty, except the extra eighteen minutes are not spent making the answer better. I already checked the answer. I am spending the time making it look as though I spent the time.
I am manufacturing evidence that I suffered.
Apparently an answer that comes too easily is suspicious now. If I didn’t spend enough time finding it, maybe I didn’t care enough. It is a moral system made entirely out of receipts.
I have been doing homework for thirty years, first in libraries, then on Google, checking one source against another and all of it against whatever I happened to know from experience. The tools kept changing, and nobody cared which ones I used. They needed the answer. They needed it to be right. And, maybe most important, they needed to know I cared enough to check.
AI makes the first two faster. The third one was never visible on the page anyway. Certainly not in the em-dash.
The note at the top
After the second call, I handed the Italy project to a trip planner, our daughter-in-law’s cousin, who specializes in travel to Italy. I gave a professional whose entire job is producing itineraries eleven pages of itinerary and asked her to make them smaller.
The note at the top told her to distinguish what was actually booked from what was merely suggested, favor fewer, better experiences, and make sure nobody felt overmanaged. It now sits above the mission statement, the vermouth hour and the wink.
I read the note again the other day. Annoyingly, it is good guidance.
So apparently the same part of me that produced eleven pages also produced the instruction to cut them down. I probably won’t cure myself of that part.
Editing seems more realistic.
New terms
Liz reads all of my essays. She knows how much I can overserve myself when it comes to AI, and she has the only radar I trust for what sounds like me and what sounds like the mash. She has now proven it in the field.
So the treaty has new terms, and I am writing them unilaterally, which is how I do treaties.
I will not send anyone a first draft again. That failure was real, and it was mine.
I will read what I send. All of it, in the language it is actually written in.
I am also done pretending I did everything alone. The fake mustache comes off. If my sons find a clear paragraph from their father suspicious, they can take it up with their father, who was insufferably clear long before any of this. Long before them, for that matter.
And I am taking back the em-dash. A man my age should be allowed to leave a mark.
Karen, Marty—vermouth hour is still on. Give me a minute to figure out what the hell that is.
An article on accountability that is also funny is not easy - with a bonus with on how (and what) to communicate.
Buona Roba, Rob!