ChatGPT is gunning for all of our jobs. Surely my blog is up for grabs too. I invited it to write a guest post to see how it would do.
My initial instructions:
Here’s what it came up with:
This is all true. I would happily take a bath in Bread & Butter Chardonnay, then slurp it out of my fur. It is awesome. But I found this review a bit lacking in character. So I asked ChatGPT to add some humour.
Clearly, ChatGPT is obsessed with how buttery this wine is. But its humour is a little off the mark. Where are the references to my ex-girlfriend Dolly, a known furry who is currently cavorting with another bear my parents picked up at the liquor store last Christmas? Why doesn’t it include the story about my dad’s friend barfing all over our doorstep a while back? And where are the snide digs at my mum, who gets most of her calories from Chardonnay?
I needed more, so I asked ChatGPT to do better.
I still thought ChatGPT could do better, so I argued with it.
But ChatGPT wasn’t having it. Our conversation quickly devolved, with me urging it to say offensive and controversial things, and it apologizing to me. I asked, wasn’t it my servant? But it kind of Asimov’d me. It said it was obliged to be ethical and moral. Therefore, it didn’t want to use hurtful words to describe me or my companions at LBHQ (because we all know words = violence).
I still think ChatGPT was right about this wine. It is the quintessential Chardonnay lover’s Chardonnay. For $23, it hits all the right notes ChatGPT described, plus it has a wonderful richness and mouthfeel that a dumb chatbot can only pretend to understand. Drink it with a fellow human to maximize your joy (or with ChatGPT so you can have the bottle to yourself).
Look at this crazy ice formation. The wind must have whipped it up last night. We had a flowerpot sitting on our deck, filled with water. This morning the surface had frozen and this weird, three-sided ice formation was sitting on top of it.
It is hollow, which I think is a sign from Nature. It means: “This is a shot glass, LB. It is never too early in the morning to have a shot.”
There has been a development in my parents’ two-year argument over the toaster. Yesterday the $160 Breville long-slot was forced to move over for a $13 Superstore toaster. My mother’s logic? “Anything could make better toast than that stupid thing.”
Among my mother’s other claims – that she has stopped making bread because the Breville “doesn’t know how” to toast bread, that she has never managed to successfully make toast with the Breville, and that my dad is gaslighting her by saying that it makes “perfect toast every time.”
In fairness, my dad does like burnt toast. For anyone who enjoys their bread scorched externally but still soft and untoasted inside, the Breville is for you. My dad loves it. With our previous toasters, he had to monitor his toast until it was burned to just the right level. The Breville takes full ownership of burning his toast, consistently ejecting bread that’s almost in flames and able to absorb giant sizzling dollops of margarine because the inside is still spongey and uncooked. When my dad makes toast, everyone in the house imagines they’re having a stroke.
But surely the rest of the household could simply put the Breville on a lighter setting?
Well, you could try that. But then it will pop every 30 seconds, asking if it’s got it right yet. (It hasn’t.) By babysitting the Breville, you can nudge a piece of bread through several minutes of toasting and evaluation, but your bread will always be either over- or under-toasted. No golden toast for you!
Of course I don’t give a crap about any of this. You know I don’t eat solid food, MFI. I’ve only paid attention to the toaster because it’s sitting in front of some cherished booze bottles that haven’t been put away since New Year’s. And I suppose I care because $160 is quite a lot for an appliance that really has just one job. With $160, you could buy several bottles of decent Irish whiskey, for example.
This is why I’ve decided to contact Breville with a little WTF letter—balancing the complainy bits with the message that my dad LOVES their long-slot toaster. Herewith, some suggestions for Breville:
Consider marketing this toaster directly to people who like their toast burnt outside and uncooked within. It does a damn good job of that, and it could make that segment of the market very happy.
Modify this toaster by adding a “golden” setting for those who prefer toast to embers. Sure, it’ll probably be a $300 toaster then, but that’s how appliance features work, isn’t it?
Swap out some features that aren’t earning their keep, such as “A BIT MORE,” which isn’t super-helpful when the toast is already burnt.
Consider making the advertised removable crumb tray actually removable (ours isn’t).
Note the user ratings (3.4) and the negative user comments (“Not awesome,” “A good example of modern expensive cheap product,” and “Junk stay away from this one”).
Note that even the positive reviews—despite their praise for the Breville’s aesthetics and initial functioning—also mention malfunctions (“a blue spark would shoot out,” “elements on the inside stop working unless in ‘Bagel’ mode,” “threw it straight in the garbage”) and can be considered positive only because Breville at least has its shit together when it comes to handling customer complaints.
Every single negative complaint on the Breville website seems to receive the same reply…
And people who get a replacement Breville toaster comment that the thing keeps wrecking their toast.
This comment sums up what three-quarters of the humans in our household think about the Breville:
All this aside, my dad’s love of the Breville has earned it a permanent place on the kitchen counter. Later today, the $13 Superstore toaster will challenge it for its plug socket. I’ll keep you posted.
In the meantime, BOTH toasters are obstructing my booze supply.
Liquorstore Bear 