AI Is Amazing

M y grill is broken.

In and of itself, there’s no reason you should care about this. Indeed, unless I need to start reading up on restraining orders, it’s probable that you’ve never given my grilling situation a single fleeting thought. But the thing is: Until yesterday, I hadn’t either. The grill was just . . . there, a few yards from the kitchen window, built into an outside station in the yard, exactly where it had sat since we moved in seven years ago. To make it work, I just had to stroll outside, press the ignition button, turn the gas up a little, and then throw whatever I wanted to eat onto the grate. Easy.

Until, that is, it broke. Or, rather, until I noticed that it had broken. For a while now, the grill has taken a little too long to light, it has made a slight alarming “whoosh” sound when the sparks eventually catch, and, having so whooshed, the heat it has generated has been noticeably uneven across the trays. For a while, I put off looking into it, because I knew that once I’d started, I’d become obsessed. But, yesterday evening, aware that the summer was now indisputably imminent, I finally resolved to put on my tinkerer’s hat and take a look to see what was wrong.

In such pursuits, the internet is a godsend. I cannot count the number of times that I have discovered that something was wrong with a random part of an esoteric appliance — Part No. CBR4-567-Y Rev. 2 in my Stevens RT 400 water heater — and, within seconds, found a grainy video on YouTube, in which a gruff Midwestern dad says, “Today I’m going to show you how to repair the CBR4-567-Y Rev. 2 in your Stevens RT 400 water heater with just a Phillips-head screwdriver, a quart of pineapple juice, and a teenage girl’s hair scrunchy.” For those who are so minded, the web is a treasure trove of DIY advice. If what you’re searching for is not on YouTube, it’ll be on a forum, and if it’s not on a forum it’ll be on one of those astonishingly specific personal websites (“Randy’s Pre-2014 Golf Cart Lead-Acid Battery Blog”) that you only ever seem to stumble across when your wife adds something irregular to your list of weekend errands and you’re obliged to become an expert before Monday rolls around once again.

This time, however, I didn’t use YouTube, a forum, or Randy’s blog. I used ChatGPT. And I’m here to report, to anyone who is interested, that the experience has persuaded me that, at long last, we are living in the gleaming future of those 1950s children’s adventure books that you see from time to time at suburban garage sales. The last time I wrote about AI, it was to suggest that the technology is unlikely to lead to mass unemployment. I still believe this. But, based on my experience yesterday evening, it may well lead to the redundancy of much of the internet as we have known it. I spent around 30 minutes on this project, and, during that time, there was not a single question that I asked ChatGPT about my grill — and, for that matter, about grills in general — that it couldn’t answer to my satisfaction and delight.

The first thing it did was identify the model. The sticker with all that information on it has long been destroyed by the Florida rain, but this did not matter. I simply took a photo of the unit and was instantly provided with the exact specifications. Then I started photographing individual components. Immediately, it identified them all in detail — e.g., “the metal part you’re pointing to is the crossover ignition tube (also sometimes called a flame carry-over tube)” — and then explained succinctly how they all worked. I was told, for example, that “several of the ceramic rods look cracked or discolored,” that the tray was “broken, and had shed loose, flaky carbonized debris,” and that the part numbers I needed if I wished to replace them were 214080P and 214081P. When I asked where I could get those replacements, I was given a range of options, organized by quality, with current prices, stock availability, and links to the online stores.

No question could flummox it. I asked why the “crossover ignition tube” that it had recognized was not working. That, it said, was because

the flame needs a controlled path to travel across. Since your main burner tubes are broken open, gas and flame are escaping the wrong way, so the flame can’t flow cleanly into the crossover tube or the adjacent burner.

I asked where the ignition system was, and was told that, on this model,

the igniter electrode is usually mounted through the firebox wall, very close to where the burner tubes start (where gas enters from the orifice). Look for a small white ceramic piece with a metal tip, positioned near one of the burner ports — probably just above the crossover tube area (near the bottom-left in your earlier photo).

Thus, within minutes of starting, I’d ascertained the exact model, located and confirmed all of the problems it was having, and ordered the substitute parts that I needed. Before I finished, I asked ChatGPT to locate the instruction manuals and diagrams that I may need when, later this week, I install the replacement innards. Not only did it find them within seconds, it drew me its own schematic — to my exact specifications — to clear up my one remaining inquiry.

It is true, of course, that I could have achieved all of this without AI. My grill is a cooking machine, not the Space Shuttle. But it would have taken a great deal longer, entailed a lot more trial and error, and involved my having to dance around the various questions I had in the hope of piecing together various snippets, rather than being able to ask them directly. Using ChatGPT instead was like having my own personal assistant — if that personal assistant was J.A.R.V.I.S. from Iron Man. Like the rest of us, I am still awaiting my flying car. But, when I do eventually get hold of one, I know exactly how I’m going to go about diagnosing the problem when, one weekday morning in June 2034, the kids are late for school and the damn VTOL thrusters won’t flare.