Sourdough starter now regularly consulted for decisions once outsourced to a search bar.
Pictured: nothing. The poster board with the tally marks was deemed "not photogenic, just accurate."
MAPLE GROVE, MN—Eleven months after the Cartwright family called a kitchen-table meeting and announced a temporary two-week household “pause” on using AI to settle arguments, sources confirm the family remains indefinitely without it, back to resolving disputes the old-fashioned way: loudly, and at dinner.
“Just two weeks, everybody,” said dad Gary Cartwright at the original meeting, a line his teenage daughter has since put on a poster board and taped to the fridge, updating the tally of weeks in marker every Sunday. “We flatten the curve, everybody cools off, and we’re back to asking it stuff by the start of school.”
It is now March.
Gary, for his part, has spent the better part of a year insisting the pause would be brief, telling his book club in January he’d “love to have it back open, just raring to go, by Easter,” a promise that has now technically recurred three separate Easters without the family laptop so much as being unmuted.
Under the current house rules, family members are permitted to use AI for “essential purposes only,” a category Gary’s wife Denise has defined as “spreadsheets, nothing fun,” a rule that has proven difficult to enforce given that Gary was recently caught asking it to help him win an argument about whether a hot dog is a sandwich, then closing the laptop guiltily when Denise walked in.
“We’re seeing real progress,” said Denise, gesturing at a family group chat that has not calmed down in four months. “We’re still fighting about the same stuff, and arguably more, but at least now we’re all fighting about it together, unassisted, like God intended.”
In the vacuum left behind, two new household pastimes have quietly taken over. The first is sourdough: the family starter, named Gerald and kept on the counter, is now consulted semi-seriously for decisions once outsourced to a search bar, with the Cartwrights’ younger son confirming he asked it what to get his teacher for the holidays and “took the bubbling as a sign.” The second is a seven-part docuseries about a guy two towns over who kept using AI the whole time and just didn’t tell anyone, a scandal the neighborhood has still not fully recovered from, and whose catchphrase upon being caught — “I never agreed to anything, I wasn’t at that meeting” — has become a running joke at the Cartwrights’ dinner table.
“I never agreed to anything, I wasn’t at that meeting.”
Enforcement has otherwise grown lax. Grandma, who was never told about the pause, continues to use it freely for recipes, a loophole the kids have started quietly exploiting by asking her to “just look something up real quick.”
At press time, Gary, asked for an updated timeline, said the household was now targeting “two more weeks,” a phrase Denise noted, without looking up from her phone, “was also what he said about cleaning the garage.”