About Holiday Cookies and the PR Pitch of the Damned
"Rebecca, hi from Open AI! Holiday hosting w/ChatGPT?"
This fragrant morsel appeared in my inbox about an hour ago, coincidentally right after I'd put a batch of Dorie Greenspan's World Peace cookie dough into the refrigerator to chill. When I was at Eater, I got this kind of PR pitch multiple times a day; now, I receive them a few times a week, and immediately delete most of them.
I deleted this one too, but not before spite and curiosity compelled me to read it. Had I ever considered using ChatGPT to help plan a dinner party? To "curate the mood and personalize details that make a night unforgettable for guests?" Here was my opportunity; what did I think?
"I think," I wrote, "that this is for people who are dead inside." Then I pressed send.
What can I tell you: my better angel had the day/month/year off. AI perfumes my average day with resentment, fear, and general despair that I have mostly trained myself to suppress. But the idea of outsourcing the holidays to it offended me on a cellular level. This would be true any week of the year, but coming as it did on this, my holiday cookie week, it made me want to pick up a flame thrower.
I've been mailing cookies to friends and families for the past few years. Two things are equally true of this ritual: I love it, and it is a pain in the ass.
As I write this, my freezer is full of cookies that are waiting to be sent off; my limited counter space has been ceded to cookbooks, baking pans, and stand mixer parts; my dining table is a staging ground for cookie tins, tissue paper, tags, and ribbon. We are about to run out of storage containers. I am steeling myself for the post office visit later this week.
Again: a pain in the ass. But that's kind of why I love it.
Look, I'm not going to rail against the myriad evils of AI here; plenty of people far more informed than I are already doing that. But I will say that what I perhaps resent most about it is the way it devalues effort* — its underlying promise is that we won't have to make any. And I would argue that the life force of friendship is effort: it takes effort to make and keep friends, and to let them know they are valued. Even effortless friendships require effort: someone, after all, eventually has to be the one to pick up the phone.
My holiday cookies are my way of letting my friends know that I care about them enough to haul out a stand mixer. I am admittedly fortunate to have the time and resources to make and send food to people. But I would like to think that the effort of friendship isn't inextricably tied to the privilege of time and resources, any more than I want to think it's something that can be outsourced to AI. The "easier" AI makes things, the more I crave a challenge: of getting to know a person and keep them in my life, of figuring out how to transport 20 tins of cookies to the post office without breaking traffic laws or my sanity.
If I could, I'd deliver them all in person. "Here," I would say, "these were a pain in the ass. I love you. Have a cookie."
*While, of course, exploiting the immeasurable efforts of the writers and other creators whose work has been used to train it.
