This should not have been a surprise, but as I am Old, it kinda was. At one point in the late-lunch colloquy over the table Sunday, someone mentioned a photo most of us had seen but a couple hadn’t — our friend Dustin as a little boy, sitting on Alice Cooper’s lap. In a golf cart — Alice was playing golf at a course managed by Dustin’s father. (Dustin often says he taught himself to read by examining the liner notes on his parents’ albums.)
Anyway, I wanted to show the pic to the uninitiated, but I couldn’t remember when it made its way into my camera roll. Google Photos is my automatic backup, so just for the hell of it I typed “man in golf cart” into the search engine. Immediately, there it was:
But there were other choices, too. A pic from an early-morning swim in the Shores, with a maintenance guy zipping across the sunrise.
A pedal pub downtown. Two, actually:
Weirdest of all, this detail from the Diego Rivera murals at the DIA:
I guess I’ve known you can do something like this — type “steps” or “waterfall” and be served the photos that match. I did not know it could be this specific. AI, which I try to avoid using whenever I can, is kind of scary sometimes.
I wish I had more to offer this morning, but I read about the president’s most recent, peak-blatant act of corruption — this, of course — and was nearly struck dumb with fury. You want to know why Democrats are so angry? Because I expect my elected representatives, all Democrats, to be SHUTTING DOWN THE GODDAMN COUNTRY right now. And it doesn’t appear to be happening. They’re worthless, every last one.
Also, I have to get a haircut. Let’s get though this week, eh?
alex said on May 20, 2026 at 9:30 am
You have better luck than I do with photo searches. I type in a description and get nada or get completely unrelated images. My library at this point consists of 65K or so images dating back to the early 2000s. Every so often when I’m texting with friends or posting in comments on web sites, I’ll remember a photo from the past and try to retrieve it with no luck. The latest was pileated woodpeckers. A friend snapped a photo of the first one she’d ever seen in her yard and shared it; I tried to respond with a photo I captured in my yard a couple of years ago when I had two of them on a tree that’s now dead. (I suspect the birds must have known something I didn’t, which is that the tree was full of carpenter ants. Nummy.) I seem to have better luck finding photos if I can remember the location, month and year. My pileated woodpecker photo, it turns out, was taken in mid-May several years ago, so perhaps this is the time when you’re most likely to see them.
968 chars
Icarus said on May 20, 2026 at 11:13 am
Like The Cloud a few years ago, everyone acts like AI just arrived on the scene. They both have been around for a long time, just under different names in their nascent form.
Think about Spellcheck for example. In the earliest days, your word processing programs* — email didn’t have it, and neither did other applications like time reporting or expense report tools — just had a file of common words. If you typed a word that wasn’t in that file, perhaps Avant Garde spellcheck didn’t catch it.
Now, not only have grammar rules been added, but there are apps like Grammarly or Hemingway that can help you rewrite it more appropriately for your intended audience.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that AI is here to stay and only going to get better. But I doubt it will become our overlords. It will put a lot of us out of jobs, but it won’t directly kill us. That is, and always has been, the billionaires.
* I use the old term programs, which later became applications and then apps and a few things in between.
1037 chars
Deborah said on May 20, 2026 at 12:16 pm
If I think of AI as a tool and not the “answer to all my problems machine” or “the answer to everything machine”, I can calm down and use it appropriately.
Illustrator and Photoshop are tools I use on design projects, I still have to have the creative ideas and fuss around with a lot of iterations before a design is working. I know shortcuts that can take the repetitive drudgery out of it, like if I’m making a repeating pattern etc. I can see that AI could be helpful for that kind of thing, getting the math right. I always start with hand drawing after I’ve done a lot of visual research. I think the hand is an important tool too. I
AI seems to me as a lot of people say, way overblown, and I don’t like the gargantuan data centers bloated on water and electricity, loud and unsightly. To me it’s not ready for prime time if that’s what it takes. Can’t they work it out somehow where all that waste and degradation of the environment is worked out first?
969 chars
Sherri said on May 20, 2026 at 12:20 pm
Not only are Dems not shutting everything down, they’re still confirming Trump nominations to the Federal bench, growing the roster of Federal judges who spout the election steal nonsense in lifetime appointments. Any attempts to clean up the Trump mess will have to cope with these judges.
292 chars
Sherri said on May 20, 2026 at 3:30 pm
To be fair, there really has been a change in what’s possible with AI; while the generative LLMs are oversold as approaching artificial general intelligence, they are a significant breakthrough. I happen to believe that the significance of that breakthrough does not support the instance amounts of capex being spent on it, but they can be genuinely useful in the right domains.
My husband and I joke that only things that don’t work are called AI; once they start working well, nobody calls them AI anymore.
Nobody talks about the Cloud anymore because it’s just the default. Yes, it was not an entirely new concept (I worked on a file system back in the 80s that operated like the Cloud), but what changed is the wide availability of fast Internet to everyone’s home. When basically everyone has fast access to the Internet, you can put everything on servers and people can access it just like it’s on their local machine. I don’t even always know when work is being done on my phone and when the work is being done on a remote server, and that boundary changes as the computer power on my phone improves and network speeds change.
As someone who has been on the Internet since before it became the Internet, I look at the device I carry in my pocket and am amazed.
1291 chars
Suzanne said on May 20, 2026 at 5:19 pm
Sherri, I remember the using the internet before search engines. It was a huge improvement it was when those came into being since it gave you the ability to find websites without knowing the web address. I liked Alta Vista and Dogpile as I recall. I distinctly remember being at a meeting and one of the people there mentioning that she had just started using a new search engine called Google and it seemed pretty decent.
423 chars
Tom said on May 20, 2026 at 6:48 pm
I miss the LexisNexis I had “free” access to as a jschool student in the 90s. That was magical yet straightforward access to anything I needed with simple Boolean logic.
173 chars
Julie Robinson said on May 20, 2026 at 6:53 pm
What I used to spend hours on Photoshop can now be done in a couple of minutes on my phone, even removing awkward bystanders. One-touch for Dynamic editing–what it does, I’m not sure, but it usually looks better. There’s even a straighten feature. Those don’t say they’re AI, that’s a separate feature, but they’re assisted in some way. Count me guilty.
But I would never use chatGPT for writing. One of my professors used to say, I don’t know what I’m thinking until I write it out, and I feel the same way.
I’ve noticed AI summaries at the top of emails. I’ve also noticed wrong dates in those summaries. A trip on June 12-14 is listed as July 13-17. We’d be in big trouble if we relied on it. Maybe I can turn it off.
727 chars
alex said on May 20, 2026 at 9:06 pm
I just short-circuited a MAGAt’s tiny brain, or his talking points anyway.
He was telling me that all the wind turbines across the Ohio line are powered by diesel generators to look like they’re working because there’s no wind in Ohio, they were just put there by Obama for appearances’ sake so he could hype the Green New Deal. And that Ohio’s a “Democrat” state.
I told him no, it’s a Republican state. He turned away and talked to the guy on the other side of him for the rest of the night.
I guess if you remind Trumpers that they’re “winning” instead of affirming their victimhood they shut the fuck up and leave you alone.
641 chars
Colleen said on May 20, 2026 at 10:36 pm
Because I am a masochist, Senator Rick Scott’s videos show up on my FB feed. They are aaaalllll about the country being victims of The Left….who, by the way, hate the country. I don’t understand how a party that controls everything can talk about all the bad things happening in the US and blame the party with no power. I like to read the comments, full of criticism and mentions of Scott’s Medicare fraud.
Dems have GOT to start playing dirty and quit bringing position papers to a gun fight. The days of “my esteemed colleague across the aisle” are GONE. The MAGAS will do anything to have their way and destroy our democracy. The Dems need to do the same kind of street fighting. Doing their own retaliatory gerrymandering is a start….unfortunately it falls under Maga’s “rules for thee and not for me” clause….
Every day I am mentally jumping up and down like Rumplestilskin screaming “someone do something to stop him” as he destroys everything he touches.
Can you believe it’s been a decade of him? This constant stress and waiting for the day’s shoe to drop is exhausting. We aren’t meant to be in this heightened state of crisis on a permanent and long term basis.
1187 chars
alex said on May 21, 2026 at 7:14 am
Colleen, if you were still here your feed would be full of Marlin Stutzman and the like talking the same line of bullshit and giving Tubby a tongue bath.
Speaking of which… (gift article)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/20/business/media/jeff-bezos-trump-washington-post.html?unlocked_article_code=1.kFA.yz2V.rAmF7w6g9tXX&smid=url-share
Bezos knows what side his bread is buttered with.
402 chars
Jeff Gill said on May 21, 2026 at 9:01 am
Ohio is a “Democrat” state? That’s some epic self-delusion right there.
71 chars
diane said on May 21, 2026 at 9:02 am
Until very recently I thought that AI was just the next (and entirely predictable) iteration of a souped up search engine, that it just summarized and synthesized as well as searched.
But my book club read If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Nate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky this month. I don’t claim to remotely understand all of their argument and I truly don’t know if they are fear-mongering or not, but my view of AI significantly changed after reading the book. (When the book was selected, I thought, “oh, I’ll never get through this and don’t want to spend my time trying” but when I started it, I almost couldn’t put it down.)
It’s scary, and I don’t think their proposals about government regulation are remotely realistic (if I understood them) and I came away very worried.
807 chars
alex said on May 21, 2026 at 10:04 am
Neil Steinberg is one of the few columnists consistently in fine form and he’s why I continue to support the Sun Times even after moving away from Chicago over two decades ago now. And this is preaching to the choir but it’s better than anything else I’ve seen regarding the recent Christian Nationalist dog-and-pony show put on by Tubby & Co.:
https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/2026/05/19/national-mall-prayer-session-christian-nation-donald-trump?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=052126%20Morning%20Edition&utm_content=052126%20Morning%20Edition+CID_2345cf5b66283b07462827179f1d732f&utm_source=cst_campaign_monitor&utm_term=Neil%20Steinberg&tpcc=cst_cm
683 chars
Sherri said on May 21, 2026 at 3:35 pm
I have not read Yudkowsky’s book, nor do I plan to. My understanding of Yudkowsky is that he is worried about AI becoming superintelligent and rendering humans obsolete and therefore, the AI Superintelligence would decide that humans serve no purpose and get rid of us, basically.
A sentient AI SuperIntelligence is science fiction, not fact, and we are not on the cusp of such thing if such a thing is even possible. I wish nearly as much money and interest were being spent on the present day harms of the AI systems being built as are spent on AI alignment.
It all makes as much sense as Musk proclaiming that his goal is to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” It sounds sort of profound and grand, but it’s really just an excuse to destroy everything in his path. Ruining the air quality in Memphis by using diesel generators to power his AI data center is a small price to pay for extending the light of consciousness, after all.
964 chars
David C said on May 22, 2026 at 5:58 am
I see Duggan has dropped out of the Michigan Governor’s race. That’s one square off your bingo card, Nancy.
107 chars