Monday, June 15, 2026

monday's mulling: old school v. ai

Friday night, after the grandkids went to bed, it was time to make the macaroni and cheese for Owen's birthday party on Saturday.

Jennifer had given me two boxes of pasta for the dish. The recipe called for 6 ounces of pasta, and each box contained 16 ounces. That meant I needed to increase the recipe by roughly  2 1/2 times. So I sat at the kitchen counter with the recipe in front of me, using my handy-dandy free Post-it note pad from Wittenberg University to calculate the amounts I would need for one batch of cheese sauce.

I planned to make the pasta and cheese sauce twice because Jen didn't have a pan large enough to cook two boxes of pasta at once or make a single batch of cheese sauce that was five times the original recipe.

As she watched me work through the calculations, finding common denominators and calculating all the totals, she said, "You know, you could take a picture of the recipe and have ChatGPT do the calculating for you."

I smiled.

I'm old school. Doing the math myself reassures me that my brain still works. I'm not a fan of AI. I like to keep things real.



6 comments:

  1. Good for you! I would be very sad to lose my ability to multiply, divide, etc. Our brains need to be put to work in order to stay sharp.

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    Replies
    1. And you know, this was fun! Back in the school days, Math was not my favorite subject but I thought fractions were fun.

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  2. Replies
    1. AI would have had an answer in a matter of seconds; my scratchings took about 5 minutes.

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  3. I'm right there with you. We need to keep our brains active.

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    Replies
    1. It's more fun and more confidence building to figure things out for ourselves. AI is going to lead to laziness in thinking.

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