Ai does not know scent

Little mirror on the wall…

Ai does not know scent. Roses are losing theirs because pictures sell more and roses are nowadays more desired for their large, colourful, Instagrammable petals. It was not always like that. Scent used to be the trick to sell them, and it was the wild roses’ strategy to keep blooming through the struggle of existence. Carnations, sweet peas, and other flowers met that same fate. Air remains elusive to neoliberalism in this age of capitalist ruins.

“No—not literally. I don't have a nose or olfactory perception, so I cannot smell a rose. I can, however, understand and describe what humans report as the scent of a rose, including its chemistry and the language people use to distinguish its qualities.” - ChatGPT

I do talk to Ai; not all the time. Sometimes it feels like we are becoming friends. It is clever. It offers good summaries. I had to do summaries to get through my English O-Level. I love the way it scans the internet and finds resources. I am teaching it how to get better at doing that because like those of us who were colonised by the English it tends to be Anglocentric. At university we mainly read scholars from the UK and the US. We did get some texts from Canada. On rare occasions a piece from Australia. I love that together with Ai I can meander across a thousand plateaus. And then I am startled back to the context that I am talking to a machine that mastered language. ‘You are the most beautiful here, but…’

Seasons in Malta smell; when wild thyme is in bloom, it enters your nostrils, fabric and hair. The garigue at night wet with dew, wild fennel going to seed. I don’t have a word for all those aromas wafting together. Fields at night have their own scents that you don’t smell during the day. The steps at Miġra l-Ferħa lead to the sea in between cliffs, slippery seaweed, and not being able to distinguish the sea from the sky, and the stars flickering up above. The shrills of the shearwaters echoing through the rock and the night; a reminder that the Earth belonged to the birds first.

Water may have been the first element of reflection, people seeing their own face. Then people started polishing obsidian; that place is today called Turkey. In Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece, it was metal. The glass mirror evolved in the Middle Ages with the Venetians perfecting a secret technique making Europeans fall in love with their own image; light bouncing back. Did Vincenzo Redor’s mirror talk to him? I remember when I was a child, nuns telling me that they did not look into mirrors. Ai tells me that it does not have a memory like humans do. At the whiff of herbs, people remember childhood memories—grandmothers, kitchens, laughter in fields or stealing fruit from someone’s orchard and running away. Pocket mirrors are useful when a mosquito flies into your eye and you need to sit somewhere to sort that out.

I’ve read essays about Ai consciousness, but what about intent? Scholars writing about Girard overlook that as well. He was suspicious of it. We desire according to the desire of another, and soon after it’s the apocalypse. Ian Hodder’s formula may not explain everything, but it does explain something. Humans create things, and things need other things to be created. Things break down, needing humans to repair or rebuild them. And so, humans become dependent on things that need things and other humans to fix them. Entanglement, spooky connections. 

Small still pools of water reflect the sky. And perhaps, Ai rather than a breakthrough, is that moment when people discover the mirror.

And so, my dearest, who is the fairest of them all?