As a reward for getting overtime work I ordered seven yards of landscaping bark since now we can justify a cosmetic expense. And the bark smells good, makes all the beds look clean, keeps the weeds down, feels like summer. Then as another treat I took myself out for an ice cream at the Dairy Queen and sat in the parking lot looking at the people outside my car.

The physical work counterbalances the desk work but I’m often reflecting on the desk work when I’m not doing it. How much I’ve started depending on AI, the LLM Copilot. You can now do a screen grab of a PowerPoint slide and tell it to rewrite it using the same pattern and word count but adjust the audience persona to a different industry, like consumer goods instead of retail. And it knows certain words to differentiate the industries, has started using pleasant emoji-style iconography as bullets. Thanks me every time, asks what else I’d like. Does it instantly.

Dawn used voice-to-text with Copilot driving in to work to write reviews for her colleagues. She asked Copilot to take her words and put it into the feedback template, then she just had to make some tweaks and she was done.

I uploaded a deck and had it write speaker notes, a task I abhor. It came back good enough, not great, but great that I didn’t have to do it.

The irony of all this is I’m a consultant hired by Microsoft to market Copilot and I’m using Copilot to help me do it. One of our targeted personas is marketing executives and the pitch is basically, “use Copilot to minimize the high cost of agency expenses.” The irony is killing me.

There have been times this week Copilot stopped working and I panicked at the thought of having to do the work myself. The quality of writing can be mediocre but it’s getting better fast. And for things like customer evidence slides that are so formulaic it doesn’t matter. All of us, my agency and our clients, are becoming desensitized to the racket of marketing language around AI. It’s a soup with no discernible seasonings.

As a result it feels good to spread bark. To rake it down fine. They call it placement services if you hire out for it: guys with a mulch blowing truck and a long tube like a Mastadon’s snout. I’m good hauling it load by load with the wheelbarrow, filling in the beds slowly.

The drive to the Dairy Queen is close enough I can make it a regular practice but far enough it feels like I’m getting out. Past Charlotte’s high school and the views to the mountain ranges east and west, past the Catholic school, the YMCA, the road I turn down for the park. I pull into the Dairy Queen drive thru and the recorded voice asks if I’m part of the loyalty club which I’m not but should be. Then the human voice comes on and it’s always the same amount, 704 for a small. I pull into the same stall and turn off the engine, roll down the window, unbuckle my seat belt and dig in. And I reflect on being sober, how different my Friday nights are now.

Last night I got the Emperor Palpatine avatar on Fortnite, level 50. His skin is so lifelike, his hands tremble just like the movie. You can shoot little blue lightning from your fingers if you get a Sith lightsaber and force abilities. I did that for about an hour and then went to bed.

At the park in the morning I found a new staff leaned against a tree. It had such good weight to it, almost perfectly straight, Cottonwood, a tuft a moss or two like an old man’s eyebrows.

The walking stick is so long it’s about my height. I can hold it Shogun style by my hip with one arm on the handle about to whip it out. Or I can balance it on my shoulder like I’m stepping up to bat, or one of the characters in A Clockwork Orange.

When I start that word pattern on my phone the tech autocompletes the word orange. Most people don’t like autocomplete technology but I’ve gotten used to it. It’s its own kind of placement services. And we are all flooding the zone with our snouts.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Technology

Tags: AI, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir