My true feelings about dishwashers

Clearly, this post is not (entirely) about the titular appliances, as that would be as dull as dishwashers.

Instead, it draws inspiration from a passage in Tim Berners-Lee's recent autobiography, This Is for Everyone.^[1] In it, the inventor of the World Wide Web asks ChatGPT to compose a poem about dishwashers in the style of Philip Larkin.

The chatbot makes a decent fist of aping Larkin's lugubrious verse, which made me wonder how it would do if I got it to mimic me on the same subject.

Sure enough, it spooled out a piece promising a 'post draft about dishwashers, written in the reflective, lightly ironic, personal-experience tone you usually use in your Ghost pieces'.^[2]

A tin ear for your own written voice is like hearing a recording of yourself: you usually hear your voice internally, so the external version sounds wrong. The same dislocation makes it hard to know whether an imitation of your prose is accurate.

I quite like:

[...] the real mark of adulthood, it turns out, isn't a perfect domestic routine. It's recognising that some appliances genuinely want to help. Yet there I was, policing every bit of sauce left on a plate as if the dishwasher were a fragile Victorian aunt who mustn't be overburdened.^[2:1]

But is it me?

Its chosen angle distracts from the prose style because it doesn't reflect my true feelings about dishwashers.

It treats dishwasher use as an emblem of adulthood, dividing approaches to it into those who prewash tableware before loading and those who entrust the entire process to the machine.

It has me down as a prewasher, which was accurate, but mostly because I ran the machine infrequently enough that its contents would have grown rancid if they hadn't been reasonably clean to begin with.

ChatGPT's comedic viewpoint is a more original stance than the familiar riff on loading the machine, which turns the process into a domestic version of Tetris.

The novel approach becomes slightly insidious because, as the above excerpt shows, its thrust is that tasks are best delegated to machines. Is the subtext that technology should simply take over?

My recent experience with dishwashers is the opposite. When the one I had stopped working like 'a fragile Victorian aunt who mustn't be overburdened', I found that doing a bit of washing up regularly is less bothersome than the palaver of loading, running, unloading, and putting away required by the machine.

The apparent convenience of the dishwasher merely defers the work it performs to a different kind of labour. And that labour is determined by the machine.

Making your written voice a chatbot's vassal leads to a similar situation. You might get something written that approximates your style, but it won't say what you really think. So it's better to get on with the writing in the first place.

Convenience isn't always king — some things are worth doing yourself. So, sorry, ChatGPT — happy to rewrite with you, but the first draft is mine.