Dear Internet,

Last week I spent a few days in Iowa visiting my friend Erika. It was her 45th birthday and she had nothing planned and I had some airline miles to use so viola! A visit.

The last time I saw Erika was in August 2023 when I visited her during the Iowa State Fair. I got to see the Butter Cow! That was pretty exciting. But since this was a few months before the Fair, we decided to do a trip around Iowa to see the weird roadside attractions.

Here is what we saw:

• Riverside, IA, where James T. Kirk was born

• Albert the Bull

• Iowa’s largest frying pan

• Large wooden nickle

• Bridges of Madison County

• John Wayne Museum

• Various Freedom Rocks

• Iowa 80 World’s Largest Truck Stop

• Iowa 80 Trucking Museum

• Buddy Holly’s crash site

• State capitol building

• Several Carnegie libraries

Plus we hung out in Iowa City (U of Iowa Hawkeyes) and Ames (Iowa State Cyclones). We were pretty close to Nebraska (which is apparently not worth visiting) and Minnesota. Turns out we missed quite a bit but hey, there is always next time!

I learned that you cannot get a non-resident library card at a library unless you are a resident of Iowa. When we stopped at the Ames Library, they gave me a blank card, which was exciting. Erika and I also took a picture with a very large library card.

When we were at the state capitol, I convinced Erika to get a library card at the law library. It’s free so why not?

Erika and I have talked about going on a trip to various waterfalls in the UP. There are apparently over 300 of them.

Nothing else exciting is going on. I’m heading downstate in a few weeks to see friends and get the MINI serviced. The weather remains…well…very Michigan. The trees and grass were sticks when I left for Iowa and when I came back five days later, the world was various shades of green. It’s delightful to look out the windows and see all the tree buds,

(Click on the IG links to see more photos from my trip.)

Spring Time In Michigan

A local farmer came into the library before I left for Iowa and told me his asparagus was coming in and where his farm stand is so I stopped on the way home from work to pick up a bundle.

Strawberry season is happening a few weeks and I’m going to make strawberry jam. When we lived downstate, I got into the whole canning/baking/etc groove since I had a fancy kitchen. Here, I have a 50+ year old stove with 1.5 burners, no microwave or dishwasher, but plenty of counter space. I still have my canning po,t and I just need to get the jars and the bits for the canning, strawberries, and a few other things. I’m thinking of making different kinds of strawberry jams, like maybe a multi-fruit one? I have no idea when other berries are coming into their own up here.

I’ve been hitting a local bakery for their day-old sourdough bread since it’s 1/2 off. Just throw those loaves into the freezer! They are looking for “interns” to learn the secrets of making bread, which I would love to do, but I’ve got so much on my plate that I can barely think straight.

Generative A.I.

So, a company I teach for has a class on GA.I. for writers that is sorely out of date. I offered to create a new class for them on the topic, but I found that I was having difficulty reconciling my growing beliefs that A.I. is fucking scary and needs to die with teaching writers how to use it. ALSO! I’m teaching a class in a few months on research beyond Google and GA.I, and I didn’t want to look like a hypocrite. I emailed the coordinator and told her I was stepping away from teaching the class and she was fine with it.

I just…I just cannot with using GA.I. for everything anymore. It’s so fucking hard not to use it, but in my head, the ethical and moral (yes, moral) failings of it send me screaming into the night. Case in point: for a class I teach on social media, I have a bit about downloading your data and deleting your account across all the major social networks. I scoured the networks’ help sites and couldn’t find a fucking thing on how to do this and when I asked Gemini (Google’s GA.I.), It gave me direct instructions and links which I verified. When I needed to figure out the type of fuse for the cigarette lighter in my car, Gemini gave me information I could not readily find via regular searching.

It’s a fucking catch-22!

Anyway, here are some recent stories that made me angry:

• The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren’t Happy About It [gift link] (When I read this, I wanted to flip some motherfucking tables.)

• Elon Musk's Grok AI Won't Stop Talking About 'White Genocide'

• Scarlett Johansson Urges Government to Limit A.I. After Faked Video of Her Opposing Kanye West Goes Viral

There is also an article in the NYT, WaPo, or somewhere else that it has gotten to the point with GA.I. eating the internet that it cannot eat anymore, so it’s eating itself.

I am so fucking wired into the internet since 1994? 1995? and technology has been great, and I understand how it works, but the sheer environmental impact and all the bad shit about GA.I., just, nope. (Trump wants to use coal to power GA.I. data centers. Yes, because fossil fuel is clean energy.) I just cannot anymore. The use of GA.I. in our culture has gone from “hey, this could be amazing” to more bias, more disinformation, more, more, more.

Generative A.I. and I have a very complicated relationship, and I recognize this. It’s so easy to get and verify the information, but knowing that one question equals a bottle of water or an hour's worth of electricity for a light bulb fills my head with dead bunnies, dried-up river beds, and a future that will look like the landscape of Dune.

Anyway. That’s me this week.

Think of the bunnies!

lisa x