People complain a lot about ChatGPT. They say it is frequently WRONG. It HALLUCINATES. It consumes and spews a firehose of BULLSHIT. Because this frequently happens with people I interact with in my daily life, I avoid it in my online life.
One of my many new country-life hobbies is asking “WTF is that?” PlantNet helps me with plants, Merlin with birds, Skyguide with stars. Today I was stumped by a pawprint, a pile of shit and some holes in the leaves of my newly-planted eggplants.
“Maybe ChatGPT can handle this one with dignity,” I thought as I uploaded a photo of the paw print I saw in the mud where I park my car, across from my front door.
Typically I subscribe to the principle “if you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.” Sure, this could be a dog print. But I know the local dogs. No dogs this big run free in my tiny hamlet. Also, wolves are a verified thing.
After some bickering, ChatGPT confirmed: it’s most likely an Italian Wolf.
After this successful confidence building measure, I asked ChatGPT what shit in my woodshed and why. It came back with: FOX.
“Key Identifiers:
Shape and Size: The scat is twisted and segmented, which is typical of carnivores/omnivores like foxes and martens.
Contents: It appears to contain many seeds and berry remnants, suggesting a fruit-heavy diet — very common for these animals in spring when berries and other vegetation become available.
Location: Found on a trail or open ground, another behavior common in foxes and martens, which often leave scat in visible locations to mark territory.”
Extra credit, ChatGPT, for illuminating detail. I do see foxes all the time. Answer accepted. That it was deposited in my woodshed has been received as an act of hostility to which I will respond at a later date.
Exercise three, “what are these holes in the eggplant leaves?”
A monkey could tell me “Slugs did it.” But I wanted to rule out the zebras.
After some suggested control techniques that inexplicably did not include salt, ChatGPT wished me “Best of luck with your eggplants — may they grow strong and slug-free! 🌱🦔” Thanks for the vote of confidence, Chat GPT! Will you be my friend?
I did not predict the follow-up:
“Would you like help tracking the foxes and the garden pests together, maybe with a camera setup?”
You said:
why not
ChatGPT said:
“Excellent choice — tracking both foxes and garden pests is not only helpful, it's fascinating. Here's how you can do it efficiently without a big investment.”
Hold up. A camera on the slugs? That’s sort of weirdo porn, innit? Fascinating seems to be doing a lot of hard work there, given what we know about slugs.
What do we know about slugs, anyway? Well, as a child of the Pacific Northwest, Carpetblogger knows a lot. In fact, this whole story gave an excuse to dig through the poorly-organized Carpetblog archive, which is not online anymore, for one of our favorite posts, from 8 March 2008. Location: Palaska Sokak, Istanbul. Night Slugs
Regular readers know that, over the past four years, members of my household and I have gone to war with various kinds of vermin: Cockroaches in a computer, rats in a washing machine, feral cats attached to a carpetdog's head, and of course, primates.
But lately, I have been struggling with a mysterious force that has challenged me in new and troubling ways. This adversary is particularly vexing because I have never once seen it, only wiped its slime off my shoes and the entry carpet in the mornings.
The Night Slugs
Our ground floor is more or less below ground, at about street sewer level. This has a lot more cons than pros. The house is poorly ventilated so at best, it smells musty fusty in the guest quarters. At worst, it smells like raw sewage, and not just when it rains. This doesn't deter as many guests as you might expect. We have issued a lot of frequent stayer cards with the caveat "management ignores complaints about the sewage."
Well, there's also the Night Slugs.
They come every night. Evidence of them is abundant -- every morning there are slivery trails of slime along the edge of the walls and cursive loops on the carpet. Now I can keep odd hours --coming home late, leaving for the airport early, arriving home early from the airport. I have never seen a Night Slug.
As a native of the Pacific Northwest, I know from slugs. Banana slugs. The great grey garden slug. The spotted leopard slug. I once saw a banana slug the length of my forearm in front of an outhouse (that outhouse was at Sammamish Bible Camp where I accepted Jesus into my heart in an unrelated incident, not in our backyard, k?). But even in my ancestral home, which far too often sheltered undomesticated animals, slugs were not allowed.
Because slugs were more common in my childhood than dogs and cats and sheep, I learned how to massacre them early -- cups of beer, a squirt of ammonia and best of all, salt. You have not LIVED until you've salted a slug and watched it instantly dehydrate like a living raisin.
I figured Turkish slugs would be no match for a native Slug Master like me. I placed salt all around the baseboards. Imagine my horror when there was no noticeable decrease in slug activity. Apparently Turkish slugs are immune to salt.
This frightens me. What kind of invisible mutant slug is immune to salt? But you know what? It doesn't frighten me half as much as some of these helpful slug hints that I found while searching for slug pictures. (It says it's a quiz, but they're all true. Proceed with caution. Highlight: Slugs produce mucus so strong that they can hang from it in midair to copulate, which they do, at the ends of stretchy mucus strings more than a foot long.) In fact, that list -- which could only be published in a Seattle paper -- derailed this whole post for a while.
So memo to guests: watch out for copulating slugs when you get up in the middle of the night. Management does not accept complaints about those, either.
Anyway, not to disparage its otherwise stellar slug coverage, but that Seattle Times helpful slug hints article is lost to time. Even ChatGPT couldn’t find it. No matter. Trust that I summarized the highlight.