Human Error

After a couple weeks away, we’re back!

And we’re talking about corn.

While away, I had the chance to eat some fancy food, one dish of which was steamed egg with corn. Alright, so the dish itself isn’t that fancy; it was at a fancy place and it was a prelude for fancier dishes. Anyway.

While eating, I realized that the corn kernels weren’t all perfectly cut. While most kernels were separate, some of them were still attached to each other in inch-long strands. This corn wasn’t uniform; an oddity as part of a meal where everything else seemed so deliberate and precise.

But then, you know what is deliberate and precise? Machine cut corn, the corn kernels you get in a frozen bag to toss in your fried rice or the sort that comes in a can. Corn that’s been processed and sifted and checked to be exacting and perfect. A person slicing kernels off the cob is liable to get some of those sinewy bits that connect the kernels together and so those imperfect strands weren’t imperfect per se but rather a marker of a human hand involved in its preparation.

Probably. Maybe really fancy canned corn comes out like that.

There is an idiom called the “Persian flaw” based on the perhaps-apocryphal idea that weavers would deliberately include a mistake in their carpets because “only God is perfect.” I would not very much not ascribe divine perfection to a machine, but a machine is precise and will do exactly as it does a hundred times over. A machine weaving a rug will weave the fabric it is given the same way every time unless instructed to do otherwise. A person weaving a rug is liable to add some variation or make a mistake – find a happy accident.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the nature of machine-made stuff, be it organizing, code, or stochastically parroted words and pixels passed off as ‘art.’ As the internet is being subsumed by both generative AI bullshit and folks adopting language and visuals that will appeal to the all-knowing algorithm, I find myself more and more charmed by the quirks of humanity. The algorithm — and language models that have fed on it — compress human speech and thought into what is statically most common; everything must have a common denominator. A fine idea, but will it play in Peoria? Stepping outside the norm means your post might be less likely to be seen in that endless scroll. Every post on reddit is worded like every hot take headline that’s like every video recommended on youtube that’s like every post on reddit. No accidents, mistakes, or non-standard turns of phrase allowed if you want to be visible; it all must be processed, sifted, and checked to be parsable and ranked by machines.

I do not think I would have cared much if the corn I’d eaten that day had, in fact, been canned or frozen (most of the corn I eat anyway comes like that anyway). Nor am I nearly refined enough to tell apart machine-cut and human-cut corn so for all I know that corn may just have been really fancy canned corn. But that rough strand, like a carpet’s flaw or a strange turn of phrase, is a reminder of the humanity behind creation, of the chef behind the counter preparing my meal.