Blah blah AI no creativity, whatever, blah.
It’s still fun.
I was lying in bed trying to sleep and had an idea. The music I was playing was the incredible 3rd Symphony by Gorecki. My brain cross-shorted with the dinner scene from Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon* and I had an idea:
Dinner for Gorecki’s Third
A meal of quiet light, intended to be eaten slowly, with conversation fading as the music deepens.
Aperitif
A single glass of Champagne Blanc de Blancs (preferably with several years of bottle age).
Served with:
- Warm gougères
- One perfect oyster
- A few toasted Marcona almonds
The Champagne is not celebratory here—it is crystalline, preparing the palate like the opening measures prepare the heart.
First Course
Thinly sliced raw sea scallops
Finished only with:
- Meyer lemon
- First-press olive oil
- Flaked sea salt
- Tiny leaves of chervil
Wine: A mature Chablis Premier Cru.
Nothing sweet. Nothing aggressive. The wine should taste like cold limestone after rain.
Second Course
Clear consommé of woodland mushrooms
Floating:
- One handmade raviolo filled with ricotta
- A few drops of brown butter
- Fresh thyme
The course should almost disappear after eating it.
Wine: An older white Burgundy.
Main Course
Slow-roasted saddle of lamb
Accompanied by:
- Celeriac purée
- Braised young carrots
- Black lentils
- A restrained rosemary jus
No towers.
No foams.
No artistic geometry.Simply arranged with confidence.
Wine: A beautifully mature red Burgundy from the Côte de Nuits.
This is the emotional center of the meal.
Cheese
A small wedge each of:
- Comte (36 months)
- A gentle aged goat cheese
Served with walnut bread.
Wine: The last glass of the Burgundy.
Dessert
Poached pears
With:
- Creme fraiche
- Honey from a single varietal
- Toasted hazelnuts
No chocolate.
No sugar fireworks.
Only warmth.
Wine: A small glass of late-harvest Chenin Blanc, served barely cool.
To Finish
Strong coffee.
One square of very dark chocolate.
Silence.
Remain seated until the symphony ends.
The final course is not food but gratitude.
That led us into a discussion of other menus and meals, which (because the ambien was kicking in) mushed in my brain with Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. which led to musing about an ideal guest-list. I thought that seating Dame Helen Mirren next to Auguste Rodin would be fun, if only for the chaos. From there, following the Greenaway thought-path, we segued into a dinner/performance of Carmina Burana as an emplaced feast with comedy and acting taking place all around the room. “That would be a blast”, thought I, as sleep took me.
* I often have “brain farts” in which my brain retrieves one concept but confabulates it with another, and it still gets through my generative filters to a cognitive layer that consumes it strategically. So, Schubert’s Trio Op100, which was in the scene before the dinner scene in Barry Lyndon retrieved incorrectly with Gorecki and I thought “the dinner scene would have been cool if it had been shot with Gorecki as the theme. Also, appropriate to the sadness of the situation in the film.” This is where I think imagination or creativity come from: offset or erroneous retrievals that become confabulated. Unless someone wishes to propose a non-algorithmic model for creativity…?
The AI took my request for a “belle epoque” illustration of guests enjoying the dinner, and decided to stick with the theme of La Tour D’argent, and it even stuck Rodin and Helen Mirren in there. Is this “creativity”?
But wait, there’s more: it asked if I wanted to be included in the dining party, with my dad, because I had recently sent it some pictures from my lunch in Paris a few weeks ago.
Marcus, I suggest you complete this creative process with an AI chef that prepares your meal. It might surprise you with some additional tasty ingredients like belladonna or diesel. 😜
as soon as they’re better than human at a given task, the joke has to shift its goalposts. the number of tasks at which they supercede our skill increases every day. what’s the tipping point when the naysayers wake up and smell what the ai’s cooking? i will have been replaced at my job by then, i’m quite sure of that.
Well it certainly seems to have sourced that from the more surreal corners of the foodie internet. I’m afraid I couldn’t read it all as my eyes started to glaze over but that was the impression I got. So dreamtime inspiration seems about the right speed for it.
#Bebe: Not everything about AI has to be pro- or anti-. Sometimes it’s just damn weird and there’s nothing wrong with noticing that.
Hmmm. I’m not certain about the raviolo in the soup, I fear the ricotta would drown the flavour of the mushrooms. I’d be willing to try it.
Strictly as a matter of taste I would prefer a Sauterne to the Chenin Blanc (and I think my wife would prefer a Tokay).
… where I think imagination or creativity come from: offset or erroneous retrievals that become confabulated.
Which reminds me of Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation, in which he (again) gets a bit out over his skis in Grand Theorizing. In short (it’s a rather fat book), he describes any given skill-set as a plane, and sees creativity – in art, humor, science, whatev – as an intersection of two such planes (“bisociation”), with results depending on the extent/density of the conjoined sets.
In this model, the combinations can arise by happenstance or deliberately: I think he hoped for a way to systematically engineer new convergences. Prob’ly AI engineers have already absorbed and applied his approach.
Three Burgundies is hardly creative! /s
don’t gaslight me lanir. “if it was cooking for you it would make a poisonous mistake” is obviously anti-ai. it’s also obviously a joke so nbd, but recognize.
Bébé @#7:
It is recognizing the limitations of AI. For software developers and system admins like me, AI can be a useful tool. You just have to know that you can not trust its output, and direct its use accordingly.
There was a clickbait article in The Guardian a few days ago about how people today are following other people’s recommendations on how to enjoy life, but finding the actions other people recommend do not bring them joy.
At least that’s how I read the article. Because the article itself was trying to suggest that the aesthetic movement in Britain in the last few decades of the nineteenth century was superior to the quest for pleasure or joy today. The author got rather wrapped up in their admiration of Oscar Wilde and the rest of the aesthetes and came across as an old man yelling at clouds.
However, it got me to thinking. I do think that many people never learn how to discover joy. They experience it, certainly, but they don’t analyze why they experience it, or the conditions which can allow it to occur.
Reading the above menu brought me joy. I have experienced most of the foods above, in settings which allowed me to appreciate the flavors and textures of such food. It really is a tremendous privilege to have those memories, but it would make me even more joyful if it wasn’t a privilege at all, and everyone could have them. Since I’ve introduced my wife to the pleasures of the palate, it has given me even greater joy. We can discuss, with enthusiasm, the food we are eating, the tastes we are experiencing, and the pleasure we are getting. Of course, I get the blame for her gaining 20 pounds, but I’ll gladly accept that in order to have a companion whom I can share these experiences with.
Food, however, is not the only source of joy. A playful rabbit, a child’s smile, even controlling a machine racing at 80 miles/hour down a highway, can bring joy. Sports exist because they bring joy. There is pleasure to be found in a perfectly thrown dart, or a well executed football play. It’s when those activities become careers for other people that the joy tends to drain from them.
It’s not that people have forgotten how to find joy, many of them have never learned. When my wife and I travel we see tour groups filled with people who are earnest about being on the tour but never getting any joy out of it. Why go?
Is it cultural? When I lived in Turkey several decades ago I visited Cappadocia a number of times. One time I was waiting outside a small room which was filled with a tour group. I wasn’t in a hurry so I was waiting for them to leave. There were some pictures on the ceiling I wanted to take a long exposure of to get a good image. They were a French tour group, and they didn’t pay any attention to their guide at all. They were all chattering away in French while their guide was talking. As they left a German tour group arrived. Again, I was not in any hurry, so I continued to wait. When the German tour guide started to speak, everyone fell silent and focused their attention on the tour guide. There was a a completely different culture being shown. Yet, that probably didn’t matter. It may have been that some of the French tourists found joy in their discussion, while some German tourists found joy in paying attention to the tour guide. Joy is where you find it.
I can find joy in the commonplace. I also can find joy in the exceptional. Last year when we visited Prague we found joy in the fabric patterns on the chairs and benches of the Cafe Orient, but also in the wait-staff. There are perfect moments, yet joy can also be found in imperfection. Schiller and Beethoven can generate enough joy to overflow into tears. Satie will tap-dance through your mind with notes of joy, none of them stronger than a whisper.
I learned how to recognize when I’m feeling joy through studying Zen Buddhism, yet I know other people who studied with me who never learned how to recognize joy. It can be learned, but I don’t know how to teach. There is no greater pleasure in life than to encourage joy to develop in others. If there is any meaning to our lives, it is to experience joy and share it.
/drunken ramble
Bébé @#7:
Here is a new article by Matteo Wong @ The Atlantic: The AI Industry Keeps Breaking the Internet
The article has lots of hyperlinks to more details.